The 5000 Project

Urumqi is known recently for the bloody riots last year, which were triggered when a han policeman killed a uyghur girl – many were killed but it was difficult to find accurate news of what really happened. Staying in the city I could see the segmentation, all the hostels were located in han suburbs with noodle soup and dumplings close by; although when walking for about 45min suddenly the people change, the buildings change, the food changes and it really feels like you are no longer in china at all – for the first time during my 3 month stay in china, I felt like I already crossed the border to the middle east or central asia. In regards to the conflict between the two vastly different people and cultures, although they seemed to be segmented, in parts they were quite happy to mingle; the most interesting observation was that in the middle of the people’s park (very han patriotic parks, they have one in every city, full of trees and sometimes a lake or two) I noticed many uyghur people dancing freely along to traditional uyghur music whilst han and tourists join in happily with no sense of fear or anxiety. Or perhaps this is all for the observation of tourists.

I met an aussie couple and we agreed to travel together through Kyrgyzstan, although the visa takes 5 days to process, if I didnt get it in on the monday I still had time to go with them; as they planned on heading to turpan over the weekend then back to urumqi. I spent all monday trying to find a photo shop to get some more passport photos processed, which unfortunately delayed the visa application. For those wondering, to get a Kyrgyzstan visa from urumqi you need the following:

– A letter of invitation, but not from Kyrgyzstan, just from yourself; pretty much a letter about yourself, your employer, where you want to go in Kyrgy, and how you like the country (rather pointless)
– A photocopy of your chinese visa and the main page of your passport
– $75, for a 1 month duration, single entry visa
– a wait time of 5 business days

This is all good and true, also quite easy; albeit expensive. I was confident enough that I will get the visa on monday, considering I submitted the visa on tuesday. Unfortunately this wasn’t so easy…

The consulate ran out of visa stickers. That’s right, the one thing a consulate is meant to provide, they ran out of. I had to wait a total of two weeks in urumqi for the visa, due to this, my china visa was to expire in two days upon recieval of my kyrg visa; I couldn’t actually make it out of the country in time, I decided instead to take a train to xi’an in central china to renew my china visa there; which takes a week (although they don’t penalise the wait time from submission of passport). I managed to convince the Kyrgy guy to add an additional week to my visa when I arrived to collect it, what he did was simply cross out the 10s and put in 17s instead, adding a signature and a little note to the already hand-written visa, I was quite worried there would be trouble on the border because of this.

I had my suspicions as to why the consulate ran out of visas. You see, when I submitted my visa, they asked me to go to a bank to pay for it, to avoid corruption the bank supplies a receipt and the money goes directly from the bank to the Kyrgyzstan government; skipping the guy in the consulate. I was happy to do so, although the guy at the consulate quickly mentioned that it may be difficult for me, being a foreigner and not speaking chinese; he offered the choice of cash, I was happy to quickly hand it over. When I went to pick up my visa, I arrived at the consulate with a bulgarian guy who I travelled with to turpan, he had his documents ready to process; however the same consulate guy as before did not give him the choice of cash over the counter. I believe that the shipment of visas rely on the information that the Kyrgyz government gets from the bank, considering the consulate guy and his lackies may be pocketing the visa dosh, the recent shipment was lacking considerably and did not match the statistical average for the current time of the year.

Sooo…. during the wait for the visa, I backtracked south for a couple of hours on a bus, with a Bulgarian and a Croatian, to a town known as turpan. Turpan is the second lowest point of dry land in the world; it is renowned for one of the oldest towns in the world, ancient mud huts which could or could not be remade by the chinese – they looked pretty authentic. I bought some camel fur longjohns in turpan for ~$10, bartered down from $30, I was told by my bulgarian buddy that in the west these pants would cost hundreds of dollars; I had no idea, considering I come from a place in the world where noone ever wears longjohns and half the people probably don’t even know what they are (for those people, longjohns are really warm skin-tight pants that go under the standard pants, used in cold climated countries; I bought it for snow preparation). I initially shrugged the guy off when he told me the starting price, thinking it was far too expensive, this believable action worked well for the rather successful bartering sequence once my friend informed me of the item’s actual worth. The surrounds of Turpan are quite nice, rolling sand dunes and old villages, uyghur people everywhere with european faces.

With the decision to renew my china visa in Xi’an, in order to leave the country without getting a $100 fine per day, I booked a ticket ASAP and hopped on the train… however with the thick security in urumqi, the train station x-ray picked up my pocket knife, the authorities confiscated it. As such, it was a while since urumqi that I managed to trim my moustache, due to the lack of pocket sized scissors.

Enroute to Xi’an! before you say “what the hell nic, why didn’t you just renew the visa in urumqi instead of taking a 32hr train to central china to do it, also why the hell should you bother trimming your moustache anyway, you look fine” well, you see I forgot to mention that in dunhuang I met a pretty amazing english speaking liberal chinese girl, the visa expiry aided in the excuse to meet up with her again as she travelled east. I wont go into details, Xi’an was also great for the terracotta warriors and a rather impressive old fort wall surrounding the inner suburbs, it was also a giant hub for wealthy chinese to buy things that are even more expensive in china than in the west.