Urumqi to Turfan

We got on the road at about 6.30 am Beijing time (everything in China runs on Beijing time), 4.30 am local time and after asking for a few directions found our way out of town.

Urumqi was much bigger than we remembered it 20 years ago. At that time it was a small provincial town populated predominantly by the ethnic Uighur. Today it is a city of nearly 3,000,000 (90% of the population of whom appear to be Chinese). The city itself looks like any other modern Chinese city now.

Once out of town the road turned south and we were on our way. At this point we were following the old Silk Road. There is a new highway that crosses the desert from east to west but we wanted to keep off that if possible to avoid the high volumes of traffic, particularly the trucks.

We had a light tailwind and the progress was good. As the day warmed up the wind picked steadily. This as well as the almost continuous downhill (Turfan is in a basin about 150 metres below sea level) meant we were travelling at time in excess of 60 kms an hour without peddling. We were flying and even though Turfan was 200 kms away it was looking certain that we would make it in 1 day.

About 90 kms from Urumqi we came to the town of Da Ban. I remembered this from 1988 as a speck on the map with little more than a local peasant's market. I had taken some photos of some young kids (perhaps 2 or 3 years of age) at that time and I had these with me now.

Da Ban has grown into quite a town since we were last here but smack in the middle of it we spotted a building with the words 'Da Ban Peasant's Market' painted above the large open entrance. It was the same building we knew from before.

Next door to this was a small shop so we entered and bought some locally made yoghurt before producing our photos from the last trip and asking the lady of the shop if she knew the kids. She called in some other women and pretty quickly we had a lot of interest and excited talk going on around us.

Initially they were more interested in the pictures of us from 1988 as well as those of our families but when we finally steered them back to the question of the kids in the photos I had taken, there began to be some acknowledgement of recognition. A phone call was made and shortly afterwards a young man arrived on a motorbike. He was not one of the boys in the photos but was the younger brother of one of them.

After lots of teasing, laughing and photos we decided to push on leaving a copy of the photo for the young man to give his brother. We could have stayed in Da Ban as we had already ridden a respectable 90 kms but with a howling tailwind now we decided to keep going.

At about the 140 km mark the road turned east and our day came undone. In the full mid-afternoon desert heat we were now dealing with a cyclonic crosswind and were constantly being blown off the road. At one point while trying to get myself back on the road my bike and all its gear was blown around 90 degrees to face into the wind with me still astride it!!

We continued on as best we could but it was becoming clear we could not get to Turfan under these conditions. It was also clear we could not camp in them either.

In the distance we saw some trucks parked at a rest stop so we decided to ride to there and shelter behind them. They had pulled off the road as the conditions were too bad for them and their precarious loads to manage either. We considered flagging down a truck and getting a lift the last 50 or so kms to Turfan and began making attempts to do so.

As we stood out on the road almost being blown off our feet, a battered old bus that had been converted into a mobile home pulled in to the rest stop. As it did so, and as if in slow motion, its front windscreen popped completely out, seemed to hang suspended for a few moments and was then flung to the road not 10 metres in front of us where it exploded into a million pieces. The wind quickly swept up the mess.

An elderly Brazilian man, perhaps in his late 70s climbed down from the bus while his wife and a young Chinese woman watched on from inside. Neil helped him retrieve the rubber seal from around the windscreen then he pulled in behind one of parked trucks. We suggested he reverse in but he chose to drive straight in. If the truck in front pulled out he was in danger of having every other window in his bus sent the same way as his windscreen.

Shortly after we flagged down a small utility truck and drove the rest of the way to Turfan.

At the Turfan Hotel where we had stayed 20 years ago we got ourselves a room but not before ordering and downing a couple of bottles of beer (750 ml bottles for $A 0.50). We had ridden 154 kms.