Author: teamxena

Baku is derived from the old Persian Bagavan, which translates to “City of God”. Azerbaijan is another oil-rich country and Baku the capital on the Caspian Sea shows it. After a 3am flight from Aktau it was a slow start after lunch (no brekkie for me)

First, a city tour skirting round the closed streets for the Baku Formula 1 starting this weekend. First thing I notice is how few women there are in the streets.

I can’t help myself and ask our local tour guide (who addresses us as “dear ladies”) why, and his response is that ladies don’t like going out in the sun. I don’t know why I do this to myself as it only increases my outrage.

Next a stop at the fabulous Zaha Hadid designed Art Museum.

I notice there is a classic car display (I think put on for the F1), and head to it. As you can see gull-wing mercs etc in lots if displays, I go and look specifically at the Soviet cars, which are fantastic..

I particularly like a little…??? (can someone identify it?)

There is also a Moskovich which is just like one on the Peking to Paris rally.

I also enjoyed the Gillie and Marc rabbit and hippo sculptures (and the gorgeous pendant lights in the cafe.

Needed much more time here, to see Azerbaijani artists’ work.

We next get dropped off at Icherisheher, the fortified Old City, and walk around enjoying Baku’s very turbulent history. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, a massive fortification was undertaken in the city and around it.

After several Mongol incursions by the 14BCE the city settled and prospered under Muhammad Oljeitu. Bakuvian poet Nasir Bakui wrote a panegyric to Oljeitu (the first piece of poetry in the Azerbaijani language). Baku is noted for being a focal point for traders from all across the world during the 15-18thcenturies; commerce was active and the area was prosperous and you can tell this walking around. 

However, Lay and I get a bit bored and tired and plot our escape from the tour guide’s clutches! – to… a sustainable Caspian caviar bar and one of most enjoyable afternoons on tour, trying 3 sorts of caviar and a bottle of chablis. Apparently, according to the waiter, for every little tim of caviar bought 10 sturgeon are released into the Caspian – justifying our indulgence for the cause. There were 3 types of caviar – beluga which was from 10-12 year old fish, Ossetra from 8 year old fish and Baku caviar from 2 year old fish. We both liked the Ossetra best.

We wobbled off to meet the others, then to a dinner I couldn’t eat as I was full of caviar, and back to the hotel for sleep. The rooms in the hotel are designed from the 1980s, brown on brown.

Day 33. Aktau. Aktau is right on the Caspian sea and is a city of 200,000 people – a big contrast from Aralsk. The next two days are long, so decided to stay back from adventures (especially as it included another mosque – and i have had enough of religious places in general on this trip) and go and get my hair cut.  That never happened so just became a do the washing, repack the bag day.

Day 34 in contrast was a 700km roundtrip in 3 4WDs to Bosshyra Canyon, where there are the most spectacular rock formations. t is very comfortable, even though one of them breaks down and we have to decant to 2 vehicles.. On the way we pass the major oilfields of Kazakhstan which are surprisingly Ma and Pa to me (and of course the ubiquitous camels)

The Ustyurt Plateau area features dazzling chalk cliffs and deep canyons and limestone cliffs. They are formed by ancient marine sediment build-up followed by millions of years of wind and water. Around 250 million years ago, the Mangystau region lay completely underwater beneath the prehistoric Tethys Ocean, a vast body of water separating ancient supercontinents). Over tens of millions of years, the shells, bones, and remains of sea creatures settled on the ocean floor, compressing into thick layers of chalk, clay, and limestone reaching up to 250 meters deep.As tectonic plates shifted, the ancient ocean gradually shrank and retreated, exposing the thick seabed to the air.

Over subsequent millennia, severe weather, seasonal flash floods, wind, and extreme temperature swings carved the soft chalk and limestone into sharp spires, mesas, and deep canyons.

Some of the formations look like a bougie tiramisu with the mocha on the bottom followed by a layer of pistachio and then strawberry topped with chocolate

Al is the driver and guide in our Pajero.He is the most openly anti-Russian,  pro-Ukrainian I have spoken to and fervently pro the Kazakh language. At a short pit stop we are instructed to buy Kazakh ice creams not Russian ones.

On the long drive home I find out that nationalism, however, comes with its own shortcomings. Apparently, people from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan support Russia not because they are more economically dependent but because they have a long history of marrying their cousins. I tease him about this. He is also worried about Pakistani immigration because it will change the Kazakh quite liberal approach to Islam, the national religion. I have some sympathy for the fear of intense religion but much skepticism that keeping Pakistanis out will ensure this.

It is sunset as we pass the oilfields again

A very long day and at 3am we take the only flight on this trip – to Baku, Azerbaijan for the next phase of our adventures. 

We are coming to end of our time in Kazakhstan, which is such a country of contrasts. Almaty is so European in character, whilst Alaska is very rural and very ‘Russian’.

To day we go to the Aral Sea, which was a large saltwater lake, close to Aralsk, which was once a coastal town. It was once the world’s fourth largest body of inland water. Its demise is of interest and increasing concern to scientists and environmentalists because of the remarkable shrinkage of its area and volume that began in the second half of the 20th century and has continued to date. This ecological disaster was caused mainly by the irrigation of cotton farms, which diverted the rivers feeding into the lake.

We set off in 4WD vehicles out of town – first onto gravel and then sand, reminding me very much of Mongolia in the Peking to Paris rally.

The landscape was fascinating. The first stop was at a village with camel and horse herds. The animals all look in good condition and I ask the village men what happens to the horses in the winter (Alan, take note) – did they have covers in -25c? This was greeted with great hilarity – no, only the pregnant mares and camels are brought into the barns. All the others stay out on the steppes.

There are lots of abandoned villages and cars and boats. The economy of the area must have been hit very badly by the receding sea.

Then we travelled on to the amazing Quttybay Canyon, where the bravest amongst us climbed to the top of a large outcrop. This areas was once the summer and autumn pasture for the horses and when winter was on the way they were taken down to near the sea which at that time was covered with forest and pasture.

Next, to the remains of the sea, which was quite beautiful, with flocks of flamingos. Our guide, Fariza, tells us that even in the last year the sea has further receded.

Then on to a ‘hot springs’ and to a delicious lunch (with great fried fish from the lake) in a yurt (note the Lada outside)

Exhausted, we all sleep on the way home, and then go out for an easy dinner – I have a chicken burger with cheese and chips something I would never order at home. On the way home I buy some water for the train and what I thought was a carton of thin crackers (0nce again, my great knowledge of Russian failed me).

It turns out that this is pasta. My Russian isn’t very good

I am getting obsessed with the Ladas and see several more when we get back to town.

I haven’t said much about hotels -on the whole they are great. The hotel in Aralsk is next to a mosque and I am woken by the called to prayer at 5am in the morning.

Day 32: to Aktau:

We are now halfway on our trip and it is my birthday. I have asked for no fuss (who wants to be 75!) BUT no one took any notice. Lay, my best mate on the tour has arranged a birthday cake, which is presented at breakfast.

Onto the train, for a 22 hour trip. We get to board on the actual platform this time because the new station is now open. Sharing a cabin with Lay- these are very comfy cabins, with boiling water on tap at the end of the carriage and I can make an aeropress coffee for us. The toilets on the other hand are disgusting.

We eat the cake for morning tea on the train

I love the long train journeys. The trains are quite slow and you can see the steppes easily from your window. The steppes always have interest

in the afternoon, Lay and I start drinking to pass the time – first a bottle of goodness knows what – it’s in Russian . Not too bad, actually

Then off to sleep – I always take a temazipan so I get 6 hours

We had the morning and early afternoon to ourselves. After doing some work work, went out in search of food. Aralsk is a small town of 23,000 people and seems the poorest of all the places we have been. There are no footpaths and it is very dusty. But I had a very nice chicken shashlik for lunch. In the afternoon we went to the local museum. The museum’s story of Aralsk’s recent history is redolent with colonisation by Tzarist Russia in the 19th century and continued by the Soviets. Mostly, the displays show non-Kazakh people civilising the locals.

The Politics of Language

On 16 December 1986, the Soviet Politburo  dismissed the longtime Kazakh General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan and replaced him with a Russian. This triggered demonstrations which were violently suppressed by the authorities; people lost their lives and over 2,000 people were arrested between two and twenty people lost their lives, and over 2,000 were arrested. While Khazakhstan gained indeoendence with the fall of the Soviet Union even 30 years after independebce, Russian remains widely spoken – by everyone this tour comes into contact with. As language is a vital symbol of national identity, the enduring linguistic prominence of Russian poses a significant challenge to fully decolonising Kazakh identity. However, according to Julian Postulart, the invasion of Ukraine has spurred a young, urban middle class to confront these imperial remnants by reclaiming their native language. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many have grown painfully aware of the influence Russia still exerts over Kazakhstan through language. It has increasingly difficult for the government to balance pressure from Russia against grassroots calls for the strengthening of Kazakh ethnic identity. After independence, millions of Russians left Kazakhstan, dramatically changing the country’s demographic make-up. Kazakhs now form a clear majority. Now Kazakh has become the language of government although all signs etc are in Russian , and older people believe that Kazakhstan owes much to foreign rule, such as industrialisation and modernisation. 

Novastan, an online independent media outlet argues that this sentiment is not shared with younger generations. They have no living memory of the Soviet Union, and seek to undo the final vestiges of Russian and Soviet colonialism in pursuit of a new Kazakh identity. For them, language is a tool for decolonisation. On the streets, for example, this is reflected in the growing popularity of fashion brand Qazaq Republic. This company, blends its clothing and other merchandise with patriotic Kazakh and English language slogans, owing its success to ongoing societal developments. In an article by media outlet The Diplomat, Biybaris Seitak — founder of a popular Kazakh language Instagram channel Kazakh Bubble — says that the Russian invasion of Ukraine made many Kazakhs realise “that speaking Kazakh was a matter of national security.” The war has made them feel uncomfortable talking about decolonisation in the language of the former coloniser.

On a lighter note, Aralsk is full of Ladas

Today we visited another mausoleum. This one was the tomb of   Much more beautiful and ornate, set on 85 hectares. It was commissioned in 1389 by Timur, who ruled the area as part of his expansive empire.

However, construction was halted with the death of Timur in 1405. Despite its incomplete state, the mausoleum has survived as one of the best-preserved of all Timurid constructions , which included experimental spaces, innovative architecture for the vaults and the dome, and the use if glazed tiles. It became the prototype for a distinctive art, which spread beyond the empire. 

Lunch today consisted of salads and chickpea soup, and was one of better meals we have had in Kazakhstan. Generally salads are great but main courses with meat are pretty awful tourist pap (eg a sort of beef stroganoff). 

Then off to Sauran, another archeological dig, which was an ancient, Silk Road fortress city, now a ruin.

Dating back to at the 10th century, Sauran survived the Mongol onslaught and later served as the capital of the Mongol White Horde and a military stronghold under Timur. 

It is an oval-shaped fort, now a ruin and an archaeological site which spans roughly 50 hectares, enclosed by impressive mud-brick defensive walls that stand up to 6m high. 

After that a quick jaunt around the bazaar (I bought a lovely cotton scarf for $4) and onto the overnight train to Aralzk. A sumptuous feast on the train for dinner and a lovely sunset.

I thought the steppes would be deserted but it is teeming with life – there are farms everywhere. 

Fun fact: 

On the way, at Tyuratum Station at 4:18am (I am not getting up for tis) the train stops at the station near to Baikonur cosmodrome the USSR  and the world’s first and largest operational space launch facility where Sputnik 1 launched in 1957 and where in 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.

I am reminded of the day this happened at Paekakariki Primary School. Mrs Green was our teacher who went through the day’s activities with us (my sister said Mrs Green “had bosoms like swords”)

Because the new Aralzk station is being opened today we are not allowed near the activities, so when we get of the train it is on the train tracks which is pretty scary. Ah….travel

Day 28 : Today was a free day so I pottered around doing washing and some mending and repacking my bag. In the afternoon I went shopping for the one thing I wanted to buy for the whole trip – a fur hat to wear in the BMW in the winter. Only rabbit or fox as both are pests.

Then off to dinner and to the train station for the overnight train to Turkistan.

The train station actually looks like one, unlike the ones earlier. And the train is no bullet train. It rocks and clunks along. I am sharing a cabin with Lay and it is cosy and warm. I sleep fitfully but for about 8 hours. When we open the curtains it is a lovely day and we are moving through farming countryside. No sheep but lots of cattle.

Day 29:
Turkistan is a place of pilgrimage for Sufi Muslims. It has the feel of a hot and dusty outpost. It is visibly more Muslim. We go to a local restaurant for our breakfast/ lunch, drop off our luggage at our hotel and head out into the countryside to visit a mausoleum of Arystan Baba. The mausoleum dates back to the 14th century and is constructed over Arystan Bab’s 12th-century grave, but was reconstructed In the 18th century the previous mausoleum, which had been destroyed by earthquake.

Most of the current structure was constructed in the first decade of the 20th century with only the carved wooden pillars, remaining from the original building. The mausoleum has a two-chambered table-tomb of Arystan Bab and three of his students, and a museum. A quran showing medieval caligraphy is on display.

The mausoleum is today a place of pilgrimage.

Next to Otrar, an ancient city near Turkistan, and an important stop-off on the Silk Road, on the borders of settled and agricultural civilizations. It was the center of a great oasis and political district. It was founded around 500 BC.

The prosperity of Otrar was interrupted by the Mongol invasion of Central Asia. In 1218, a Mongolian trade caravan of around 450 men arrived in Otrar, including an ambassador of Genghis Khan. The governor of Otrar, accused them of being Mongolian spies and arrested them and executed the entire caravan. Genghis Khan responded by sending a delegation of three diplomats to Sultan Muhammad, demanding they be punished; but Muhammad responded by beheading the Muslim ambassador and shaving off the beards of his two Mongol companions, provoking Genghis Khan into a retaliatory invasion.He besieged Otrar for five months in 1219, eventually breaching its walls , massacring the inhabitants.

Many of the towns in the oasis never recovered and were abandoned. However, Otrar city rose again and became an important political and economic center. By the middle of the 13th century, it had returned as a large trade center on the way from the West to the East. a prolonged period of revolt, which resulted in the economic decline of the area and its towns. As the Eurasian arm of the Silk Road gradually lost its importance, so did the city. Through the 17th and 18th centuries, the irrigation system slowly fell out of use, and the lower part of the Temir-aryk dried out. By the end of the 18th century, there were only 40 families remaining in Otrar, compared to perhaps 5,000–7,000 in the 14th to 17th centuries, and the irrigated area had declined to about 5 square kilometres

It is now a very large archeological dig. Systematic digs starting in 1969 uncovered ancient mosques, a palace, a medieval bathhouse, and residential quarters.

It is scorchingly hot. On the way home I suggest we find somewhere for a beer – no alcohol sold in public places in Turkistan, and not at our hotel. I am over it by this point and decide to skip an alcohol-free dinner and go to bed.

What a beautiful city Almaty is. After the dourness of NW China where everything seems constrained, Almaty is like a big breath of freedom. It’s a more cosmopolitan city with  lots of European tourists.   And very green. This morning (after the best breakfast since my French one at the Sofitel) we had a tour up into the local mountains to a ski resort. Almaty gets very cold in winter with lots of snow. The weather at present is beautiful and autumn is making its presence felt with the trees beginning to turn yellow and red.  We went on 3 cable cars to about 3000m. The air was so clean and not at all cold. 

After a rather ordinary buffet lunch we visited the ethnographic wing of the local museum. 

As early as the Late Bronze Age, in the 10-9th ВСE the area was inhabited by settled tribes engaged in farming and cattle-breeding. Those people lived in clay houses forming small settlements. Such settlements were discovered on the northern outskirts of the city and in the area of Koktyube Mount. Later the Saka and subsequently the Usun tribes came to settle in the Almaty area. 

In 1969 the ancient Saka mound Issyk was excavated near Almaty. In the grave edged with fir logs, on the wooden floor, they found remains of a Sakian warrior dressed in clothes covered entirely with golden plates. His high pointed hat was decorated with the images of winged steeds symbolizing the God of the Sun. The warrior’s arms comprised of a long sword and a short dagger. Also clay jars, wooden trays, precious jugs made of silver and bronze, and a silver cup on the bottom of which they found an inscription consisting of 26 mysterious signs were discovered in the grave. 

Data based on written sources, coins and other archeological finds indicate that the modern city of Almaty emerged under the name of Almatu as early as in the 10- 11th centuries, and (move up – the area of Almaty (named Verny) was inhabited by nomad tribes in the Bronze Age) .

The region was ruled by the Qara Khitai during the 12th century, and became part of the  Mongol Empire in 1218, until the disintegration of the empire at the end of the century, after which the region continued to be a part of the subsequent Chagatai Khanate, and later of the breakaway Moghulistan.

This region was an important trade route between the West and East, with cities such as Taraz to the west and Almaliq to the east serving as major stopping points until numerous wars  

it was then absorbed into the Russian Empire in the 1850s. .In 1918, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the establishment of Bolshevik rule, Sovietpower was established in Verny. The city and surrounding region became part of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. 

On 5 February 1921, Verny was renamed Alma-Ata

Almaty, previously named Alma-Ata( and that name has particular significance to those of us in public health as the place where the declaration of health as a human right was signed. Reaffirmed health, defined as complete physical, mental, and social well-being, stating that gross inequalities in health status between and within countries are politically, socially, and economically unacceptable ) 

On 31 January 1928, Leon Trotsky, Leon Trotsky, leader of the 1917 October Revolution(and my favourite Soviet – partly because of his affair with Frida Kahlo – was exiled to Alma-Ata by Stalin, then expelled from Alma-Ata to Turkey, before eventually going into exile in Mexico City and to his death by ice-pick – but I am digressing) 

Verny (Almaty) was the capital of Kazakhstan from 1929 to 1991 (during the Soviet era) and after independence until 1997, when the capital was moved to Astana).

After the museum we visited Panfilov Park and the very beautiful Russian orthodox cathedral.  Before reaching the cathedral you pass a monument honouring  28 soldiers from an Alma-Ata infantry unit of the Red Army who died during the Battle of Moscow during WWII. Altogether,

Around 1.2 million citizens from Kazakhstan were sent to the front lines. Official estimates place the total casualties (killed in action, missing, or died in captivity) from the republic at roughly 600,000 to 601,000.  The cost of war…….

The Ascension Cathedral was completed in 1907, the cathedral is made out of wood but with no nails. It stands 56 meters tall, and is claimed to be the second tallest wooden church in the world. Isn’t it interesting that despite all the Soviet might, religion still thrived.

I had to wear a headscarf to go into the cathedral, but all I could think of was March 22, 2019 when women across NZ wore headscarves to show solidarity and support with the Muslim community after the Christchurch massacre

Exhausting day, and dinner consisted of beer, nuts and chips from the minibar

Urumqi has a very different feel to it. Apart from being a bigger city of 4 million, people look very different.  While they are Muslim, according to our guide, unlike Xining, headscarves are banned.  He was a great pains to tell me that everyone was the same apart from food, language and dance and that the women in Urumqi didn’t want to spoil their beauty by wearing a headscarf. There are also no visible mosques.  

We first went to local museum which houses a large number of mummies, preserved because of the dryness of the climate.  The musuem was madness with huge numbers of Chinese people pushing and shoving to get a view. In the end I gave up before I murdered someone, and waited for the others.

Hundreds of archaeological sites near Urumqi are cemeteries of considerable extent. Due to the local conditions (extreme aridity and sandy, highly saline soil), dozens of cemeteries around the southern and eastern edges of the Tarim Basin contain extraordinarily well-preserved mummies, together with the textiles in which they were dressed and the artifacts that accompanied them to the afterworld. Their lifelike appearance is the outcome of the special environmental conditions ; after thousands of years, not even slight amounts of moisture penetrated these burials.

The image above is named the Beauty of Loulan and wears garments of wool and fur and a felt hood with a feather; she was buried with a comb, a basket, and a winnowing tray.

After the museum, we ventured out to the bazaar and had a great Uyghur lunch of bbq lamb and flatbread. It is obvious ‘culture’ is allowable.  

Then a bit of shopping, a rest and then dinner, before boarding the overnight train to the border of China and Kazakhstan. Overnight trains are quite an experience. You have a small cabin which sleeps four, 2 lower bunks and 2 upper. You may be sharing with people in your party or with others.  In this case, Bronny our tour guide and I had the bottom bunks and a Chinese woman and a Kazakh/Russian man the top ones.  The Chinese woman did not say a word but the Kazakh man chatted a bit via Google Translate. People do their best to be polite, not intrude.  But I sleep relatively well on the train (4 hours). I think it’s the rocking. 

The washing conditions on the train leave a lot to be desired.  There is usually one Western and one squat toilet and a washroom with several basins.  You have to take your own toilet paper. The toilets are pretty awash so you cannot take your shoes off to go for a pee in the middle of the night.  And you have to put the used toilet paper in a bin beside the toilet no matter what. In the morning you will be having a dab under the armpits or brushing your teeth with 3 other strangers. It makes you long for clean toilets on NZ highways Lay, on the tour,  (she is Singaporean by birth but has lived in Canada since she was 23) gave me great tip- use panty liners which you can change in the morning.  

After an attempt at public hygiene it’s back to your cabin for whatever food you have packed for overnight. In my case it was a lovely hard bread with fig paste inside – a large circle version of a fly cemetery (sorry forgot to take a photo) One of the good things about the train is that at the end of the carriage there is a built-in urn with boiling water.  I bought a largish insulated cup with a very tight lid (good choice). I am drinking a lot of various types of green tea (teabags from each hotel).  I haven’t attempted the aeropress on the train – too messy and too much movement. Using it in hotels that have terrible coffee. 

At 9 am (until we put the clock back 3 hours) we get to the border at Kargos. Then 3 hours of hell (rather boring hell).  We walk a few hundred yards to a bus station. In the first instance we are allocated and get on a bus and driven for about 10 minutes to begin the process of exiting China.  You take all your luggage with you. Your bags get scanned and then you queue and when it is your turn each passport page is examined and details taken down into a computer.

You get through that and get back on the same bus and travel through no-man’s land to the Kazakh border and the whole process is repeated.  Then back on the bus again and driven half an hour (to arrive at the new 9 am) to a small town where we are met by our new Guide, Virgitta.   We were then taken to a very modern, upmarket Turkish coffee shop for breakfast (which feels like it should be lunch). I had shakshuka which was not bad.   Next a two- hour drive to the Charyn canyon which is in the middle of a national park. The surroundings are very familiar from the Peking to Paris rally although we went into Kazakhstan from Russia.   The canyon is spectacular, roughly 154 km in length.Though it is smaller than the Grand Canyon it is equally as impressive. We had a wonderful ranger to take 3 of us in his 4WD as it is very steep. 

Next we drove to Almaty to our hotel. Very long and exhausting day

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This morning we visited the Jiayuguan City Museum .The museum was really disappointing in that it was beautifully presented but really only an advertisement for the triumph of a city built out of nothing in the desert. Nothing of the hardships faced by the steel workers and their families sent thousands of kilometres from NE China to the NW frontier.  

The History of Jiayuguan

Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty secured this area around 200 BCE, using it as a major route for trade and military defense.and it became a Silk Rpute hub.   Ming officer Feng Sheng began constructing the main pass in 1372 under Emperor Hongwu, and the extensive inner city, outer city, moats, and watchtowers around were finished by 1540, taking 168 years, this massive adobe and brick fort guarding inner China against northern nomadic groups (the end if the Great Wall). It became a place where disgraced officials were exiled, including commissioner Lin Zexu in the 19th century, passed through the gates, who wrote famous poems about Jiayuguan’s harsh beauty.

To the twentieth century, and prospectors from Team 645 of the North-west Geological Bureau discovered major iron ore deposits in the Hexi Corridor of the snow-capped Qilian Mountains. Over 1,500 people went on the expedition, and 11 lost their lives. This led to the founding of the Jiuquan Iron and Steel Company in 1958 as part of revolutionary China’s ambitious drive to establish the basis of a modern, industrialised economy. 

Then tens of thousands of laborers, engineers, and technicians arrived simultaneously from heavy industrial centers in Northeast China (Manchuria) and local Northwest regions. The first generation of workers faced some of the most brutal environments in modern industrial history. In the late 1950s and 1960s, their reality was defined by a local saying: “When the wind blows, rocks fly like dust, and there is never enough oxygen to breathe.”  Workers who came to the region dug the earth with their hands, trudged through waist-high mud, and carried heavy equipment on their backs. They faced the desert’s biting cold and punishing heat.

Before actual factories or brick dormitories were built, tens of thousands of workers had to live in temporary tents or primitive shelters dug two meters into the ground and roofed with desert poplar branches and mud. With winter temperatures of down to -30deg C, workers slept under layers of heavy cotton blankets and piled their sheepskin coats over their feet. Frequent sandstorms would rip tents right out of the ground. Workers commonly woke up buried under a layer of sand or with mouths full of grit. Because heavy machinery, cranes, and transport vehicles were incredibly scarce in the early days, almost all of the heavy lifting was done by hand in the frozen earth, and hundreds f tins of steel factory parts were hauled to the construction sites by workers using their bare shoulders, crowbars, and wooden rollers. Drinking water had to be trucked in via water tankers from rivers or springs tens of kilometers away. Each person’s daily allowance was strictly capped at just a few litres. 

As well as the steel plant, the nearby China National Nuclear Corporation No. 404 Factory was established established in 1957 just 100 kilometers west of Jiayuguan, to support China’s first atomic bomb project.  It was omitted from public maps and functioned as a self-contained, semi-militarized community with its own municipal government, infrastructure, and underground defense systems.

It brought in an additional 50,000 employees and their families to the immediate area. For the scientists, engineers, and workers the physical hardships were compounded by massive psychological and health tolls Workers were told to tell their families only that they were “going on a business trip to the Northwest.” They were forbidden from writing letters or revealing their location, effectively disappearing from society for decades.In the rush to refine China’s first nuclear materials (like Plutonium-239), automation was practically nonexistent. Top scientists and senior technicians manually handled highly radioactive components in poorly shielded labs using basic rubber gloves. Many knowingly sacrificed their long-term health, and some their lives, to hit strict national deadlines.

Because of this rapid and organized migration of labor to a formerly barren desert outpost, the central government created Jiayuguan City in 1965 strictly to manage the sheer volume of incoming workers and their families. Most residents of the nuclear factory were relocated to Jiayuguan by 2006 due to structural aging and cave-ins, leaving behind an eerie, largely abandoned urban ghost town and nuclear plant 

The resilience of the workers gave rise to a famous Chinese industrial motto: “We gave our youth, we gave our lives, and we gave our children to the desert.” Their sacrifice is the sole reason a massive modern city exists in the Gobi today.

On to Urumqi in the afternoon.  Another fast train – very comfortable 6-hour ride through the desert to our last stop in China,  Urumqi.

oday was a visit to the far west end of the Great Wall of China.  I have fond memories of the Beijing end of the Great Wall from the P2P rally.  

Even in this far flung outpost it is still really spectacular -such an incredible engineering feat.  To get to the site we had to get a Camel Car (strangely translated as cable car). The Chinese seem to have a love affair with Disney images.

However, the Great Wall is one of the greatest architectural miracles in the history of world

Three thousand years in time, one hundred thousand li (25,000 kms) in length, the Great Wall was a military system of defence. It was begun in the 7 century BC and continued throughout the period of what the Chinese call the Warring States, then all Dynasties down to the Ming.

There was also a Great Wall museum, not terribly interesting, except the the outside statues

Next, yet more food for lunch. This time really lovely, especially this blackened tofu.  

I am really enjoying eating food I have never had before. And there are still lovely mushroom dishes which I never get tired of.  

Things about the Tour

I thought I’d have a section every so often about the tour itself

Today: What works and what would I do differently if I was going on this trip again:

Clothes: I chucked my jeans and a skirt early on. The jeans were too heavy and the skirt unnecessary. If doing this again I would buy lightweight drip dry pants and shirts (which some people on the tour are wearing). My trousers are cotton and linen and take a while to dry. My little pink dress that doesn’t crumple was also a good choice for going out  My sleeveless puffer jacket has been excellent when the weather turned cold as was my wool jumper. I probably didn’t need to bring as many underpants but choosing lightweight ones was a good choice as they dry easily.  I would not bring such heavy sandals, rather lighter hiking sandals. My bumbag and backpack were good choices.  

Electronic things that really work are the airtag trackers – even though I haven’t left anything behind, it tells me on my phone when my suitcase, bumbag or daypack are not with me. I chose a Holafly international e-sim with unlimited downloads, which costs $100 month. While it took a bit of work to get going, it has been seamless so far across countries. 

I haven’t made as much use of my aeropress as I thought I would but when I do use it I love the coffee it makes. 

It’s a bit heavy but very glad I brought my computer as I have done some work while away and I have downloaded tv series and movies to watch in the evenings (and especially when I was sick).  I also use it to post my blogs as posting doesn’t work well on my phone.