turpan to urumqi by bus

After the tour, I walked the half mile from Tulufan Bing Guan to the bus station and bought the next ticket out of Turpan. In the crush of people, bags, and onlookers in the parking lot, I boarded the wrong bus and was shouted off by the rightful ticket holder a few minutes later. I took a few minutes outside that bus to repack my bags but it was tricky trying not to let anything touch the ground, the many darkened circles indicating dried phlegm or worse. There were also potholes full of opaque gray liquid; anyway, not a ground upon which to put anything. (There’s also a mysterious spot of something greasy and brown on the hem of my pants. It appeared after I exited a particularly disgusting squat toilet heaped up in shit. I’ve declined to investigate the stain further.) I bought my consolidated bags on board, as well as a plastic bag of food I acquired for the three and a half hour trip: (1) two hubcaps of Uighur bread, which I realized would be better described as pizza crusts; (2) two tea eggs; (3) remainders of my sweet crackers; (4) raisins and grapes; (5) a prepackaged cooked hot dog which turned out to be the texture of tofu and tasted exactly like something that will lead to colorectal cancer should taste. I took a bite of the last and spit it out immediately.

The bus was at least twenty, maybe thirty years old. The seat covers said “BMW,” but upside down. Everything smelled like old sweat. It was in the upholstery. The vents did not work. Somebody had inexpertly cut a hole in the wall behind the driver to thread the power cord of a television through. I sat next to a pretty Uighur woman who partially covered her hair in a scarf and spent at least half of the ride grinning at text messages on her cell phone. She battled with the Uighur woman sitting in front of her for the square of curtain that could block the harsh sunlight from one, but not both, of their seats. Most of the people on board - I don’t know if they were Uighur or Kyrgyz or Kazakh, but they were not Han Chinese. The oldest men had long white beards with no mustaches; the middle-aged men had dark mustaches but no beards; the youngest men had neither or just scruff. Many of them wore oversized cheap coats cut like blazers, worn button down shirts, worn nylon trousers, worn shoes, and puffy berets or crocheted white skull caps or green tufted caps that look like mini pillows. Their features were central Asian: round eyes, large noses, broad hale bodies. They brought all sorts of oversized cargo stuffed into unsuitable packages held together with twine. The plastic plaid bag that zips into a overstuffed rectangle that is so favored by poor people in developing countries – Laura liked to call this “circus nightmare bags,” for its coloration – were popular here, too. We piled everything haphazardly under the bus. A woman brought a cubic meter of raw wool or cotton in large paper bags and put them on top of my bag. A Leonardo DiCaprio movie badly dubbed into a language I can’t understand played overhead, except something was wrong with the DVD so that each syllable stretched out into five seconds of very loud metallic reverberations. I put my headphones in and fell asleep to trance music.

We drove across a landscape that was the bleakest I’ve ever seen. Even Rekjavik outside the airport and Utah between Nevada and Saint George were not like this. The hardened lava of Kilauea Iki has more life than the Turpan Basin. It was gray desert in all directions to the horizon. Not even grass or scrub or sand – just gray gravel. There was not even topography for the first 50-100 kilometers. I was puzzled to see, among this, a few people bent over what seemed to be acres of bright red carpeting. We passed by a few such scenes before I realized they were tending to hot peppers that had been laid out to dry in the desert. After a while, rocky hills rose alongside the highway, then bunchgrass, then stands of birch trees, construction zones, and then the smoggy metropolis was in sight. I kept falling asleep and waking with my chin snapping down against my chest. We arrived at the bus station in Urumqi at rush hour, and I was unable to find a cabbie willing to drive me to the train station, so I stopped in a Uighur restaurant, pointed at a random photograph on the menu, and ate a meal of wet noodles with a cup of yogurt and a pot of tea.

Even forty five minutes later it was difficult to find a cab, so I followed a man into an unmarked vehicle and bargained for a 20 yuan fare – still twice what I would have paid in a regular cab. I sat in this car for twenty minutes while the driver roamed the bus station looking for other riders. He found none, then he beckoned for me to switch into another car. I followed. We left. The driver hollered at me when we neared the train station to get out in a hurry so that the police would not see the rider and the unlicensed taxi. I whined (“Hao la!”) and left. Then I had a panic when I thought my ATM card had stopped working, but I recovered, bought train tickets, spent an hour in an filthy Internet café (glowing, snoring, sweating late adolescents; piss-smelling, also in the upholstery, the smell faded when I switched chairs), then followed a tout to a dirty hovel of a hotel next to the train station (peeling paint, single flickering fluorescent, ancient dirty furniture, stains, paper thin walls, paper thin doors, neighbors arguing over the sound of a television, toilet without a handle for flushing, sticky wet bathroom floor, cigarette butts extinguished in a tray of black liquid), and spent the night trying not to touch the surfaces in my room.

The tout instructed me not to divulge that I was an American, lest I be charged twice the rate for my hotel room. He spoke on my behalf and grabbed the key out of the attendant’s hand once it was offered. He followed me into my room and did not seem to want to leave. He asked, twice, “Are you a man or a woman? Which one is it?” The first time he asked, I said, “I’m not telling,” but the second time I said, “A woman dressed as a man.” He said, “I knew it! Because you don’t have – ” and at this, he drew a line across his throat with his finger. Actually, the second time he asked he said, “Are you a male comrade or a female comrade?” “Comrade,” for the younger generations, is slang for gay; I doubt the tout intended this, but I took secret pleasure in saying I was a female comrade. He wrote his surname and a phone number on a piece of paper and insisted I call him to book a tour to Tian Chi. I told him my surname and turned the deadbolt as soon as he left.