We could have taken the bus from kashgar to osh, however it only runs once a week and it costs a hefty $100, also, as we found out along the way – the bus wasnt running due to the immense buildup of snow on the pass.
So, we hopped in the car to urchut from kashgar. Only one hour into the journey and my travel companion noticed that the cars coming the opposite direction had snow on their windscreens, I went to look for myself, at the sight of snow I became very excited.
You see, for those who don’t know, for all my life thus far I have lived in Perth and surrounds; Perth is the capital city of western Australia, the state takes up a third of the large country and it snows once a year for about 15min on the top of a hill (which we call a mountain) 600km south of the capital. I had never seen snow until this point, other than a brief trip to Victoria in the east during the end of the snow season in which most of the snow was just sludge. I was very excited, I had no idea at the time that the snow on the windscreens of oncoming traffic was only just the beginning.
Moments later it started to rain, well, I thought it was just light rain – however the rain seemed to float. At the same time I noticed that the terrain gradually turned white, the light rain became heavy; yet lighter in weight. My first experience of snow falling and it was pretty amazing. We arrived in orkut, we knew that we had to find a driver to take us over the china border to the city of osh in kyrgyzstan, we were told that the best and cheapest way was to hitch a truck… although we didn’t see any trucks heading in that
direction… also this is around the time when I discovered that snow is wet, and my only pair of shoes were not waterproof. Before my shoes and socks became too wet, we hailed some drivers and attempted to barter the price – it seemed to be a fixed rate, we assumed this was because only the hefty 4WD cars were able to cross the pass, we also assumed that the snow hazard may be why we didn’t spot any trucks. They wanted $45 each and didn’t seem to budge, the snow was getting heavy and my feet were freezing off. We gained shelter in the bus station that wasn’t being used for buses in order for me to dry out my shoes, I changed socks and put on my recently purchased chinese plastic slippers; took out two plastic bags from my bag and used them to cover my slippers to provide some temporary means of waterproofing. It worked quite well.
With the day turning old and the fear that my companion may not make it to the border within the last day of his chinese visa, we agreed to the extremely overpriced fee and headed in the direction of an icy road that held signs signifying that the path was closed. The 7hr drive was amazing, very quickly everything turned white and the road seemed to narrow as the snow gained territory. Amazing mountains formed in the background, with everything being pure white, it was difficult to tell where the different layers of snow mounds began and ended. 2hrs in and there was construction on the road, assumably plowing, we were forced to take a side track over the snow which was quite treacherous, almost getting bogged attempting to return to the main road. One hour later, we were greeted with a traffic jam, a truck had become bogged in the middle of the narrow road; this was probably the reason why the road was closed. It took one hour for an
alternative path to be plowed in to shape, there was no telling how long the traffic was waiting previously for the plowing machinery to arrive. It puzzled me why the truck couldn’t simply be pulled out by another truck.
We arrived at the chinese border, however considering the delays, the border was closed and we were forced to stay the night. The
accommodation that we found was a small room in a set of storage sheds that was setup with bunk beds and a coal stove. All the guys from our car stayed in the same room, we didn’t see them until very late at night, when they came back all of them were drunk on vodka and half of them had a turn of vomiting outside, we had no idea there was a drinking house in town. Later in the night I head the loud squeaking and scattering of rats which reminded me of the hide back in taman nagara in malaysia. With my past experience I decided to put my bag on the empty top bunk which seemed to prevent the rats from getting to the food in my bag.
The next day we walked to the border, my companion got away with not paying a fine for his visa, we hopped in a truck and headed towards the kyrgy border. 4 passport checkpoints later and 4km, we arrived in Irkistam, with shitloads of snow and absolutely no traffic heading in the direction where we needed to go – word on the street was that there was a new president elected just a couple of days earlier and noone had paid for someone to plow the pass, we were stuck in a shanty gypsy town full of concreted caravans for 4 days until someone would bother to allow traffic to kyrgy from china. The snow, the family we stayed with and the amazing view was well worth the travel delay.
The 5000 Project 