If you take a brief look at Google maps you’ll see that Kashgar sits at the North West corner of the Xinjiang province and the Taklamakan Desert. You’ll notice that the desert is so big that it even dwarfs the neighboring Stan countries in surface area. To me, it looks like a huge basin where the sand is only prevented from spilling out of the edges and spreading further by a huge barrier of mountain ranges to the east and north and an enormous plateau to the south. There is no natural water sources in the desert, which means that even for the hardiest of silk road traders this desert was an obstacle too treacherous to contemplate crossing and lead to two branches of the silk road forming – one to the north and one to the south. Armed with this smidgen of knowledge I knew that we were in for a serious stint of trucking over the next few days and just as we were about to leave Kashgar our guide Louis Long, who was wedged into the luggage in the back of van said, ‘You know what Taklamakan means?’ In return to my ‘No’, Louis replied, ‘If you go in, you will not come out’. The only reply that I thought could give the translation justice was, ‘Shizer!’
The morning we set out on the northern route we were still surrounded by a dusty haze, which according to the locals was a result of either a dust storm or weapons testing in the desert. After our thorough frisking at the Irkeshtam border by the army, I imagined that it was the latter. Driving in the haze had the strangest effect! Looking around gave me the perception that within a 10 mile circumference there was no dust at all, however, after that point there was a thick layer of dust that obscured the desert to the right and mountains to the left. I thought that if you looked down on us from above we would have looked like a scurrying ant that was protected from the gigantic dust cloud by a huge glass cylinder that moved along at the same speed. Stranger still, the single lane highway that we travelled on had -along its length- teams of women that were sweeping the roadside! Their only protection from the desert and the terrifyingly heavy laden, red trucks was an orange florescent waist coat and garments, which they had covered themselves from head to toe in, leaving only their eyes exposed. Given that the road was surrounded by sand I considered their jobs to be as difficult as pushing a water-buffalo, backwards up a hill.
Initially the roads were in great condition until out of nowhere and without any warning a huge mound of soil as high as the bonnet of a car blocked the road in both directions. This was the only warning that we had before encountering an undulating diversion that bypassed the repairs to the potting road ahead. After we had accumulated miles of road beneath our tread, we thought that we had become accustomed to the bobby-trapped road, but on one such diversion we were in for a shock.
Within minutes of approaching another diversion, a police car sped past us. At the diversion, I crossed in front of the soil blockade and slowly rolled Miranda off the side of the road. As we lurched from side-to-side, until I felt all four wheels roll off the tarmac, I could see at least five policemen bunched together looking down the diversion at a black sedan car that lay on its roof. Its sides looked like a tin can that had caved in, but the cockpit was still in one piece, which made me say out loud, that the drivers must have survived the accident. As we bumped down the diversion it looked like the accident had only happened half an hour ago. Passing the crumpled car I was shocked by what lay hidden from view. In the desert, twenty meters from the road I saw a man lying face down in the sand. His body looked like a ragdoll with his four limbs placed in contorted positions. Shockingly, I noticed that a pool of blood had soaked into the sand around the man’s damaged head. In arms reach of the body, a lady sat in the sand with her back to the man. Her knees were tucked into her chest as she stared into the desert with lifeless eyes. As we drove on I was struck by the lack of dignity in the way the dead man had been laid out.
Later, miles of road stretched out in front of us and all I could see was the image I had just witnessed. What we had seen confirmed how treacherous our journey could be and that any lapse in concentration -on what you think is a mind numbing straight section of the road- could have dire consequences. For the rest of the day we only stopped to fill our tank and to empty our guides tank (I think he had a serious case of Delhi-Belly). Apart from that we continued into the night until we arrived (knackered) in the first city Kuche (Kuqa) that sat on the edge of the desert. The 600km we had just driven was the first real experience of driving in China. It felt like we had driven across the whole country, however, when looking at the map later, it revealed that we had barely made any progress at all. What we didn’t know was that our first challenging day trucking was going to be the template for our time in China.
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