The Great Kashgar Bus Convoy
In the Fall of 1992 Finn Wilcox and I set out on the Silk Road from its eastern terminus in Sian/Xian. Four weeks later, we were sitting in the lobby of the Chini Bagh Hotel in Kashgar. We had traveled as far west in China as we could go and were waiting for word on how to proceed to our final destination, which was Islamabad. The Karakoram Highway was the only road there, and it had been closed by landslides more than a month. And there were no flights.
The Chini Bagh was where the old British Consulate used to be. The former Russian Consulate was down the street masquerading as the West Gate Hotel. A hundred years earlier, when Russia, Britain and China vied for control of Central Asia, these two consulates, along with the local Chinese yamen, housed the principal adversaries in what became known as the Great Game. During the heady days of imperialist expansion, the empires of China, Russia and Britain all met in Kashgar. For its part, China had preceded its rivals there by 200 years, but Moscow was just as close as Beijing, and Delhi was a lot closer than either.
But the Great Game was over, and Kashgar was once again a city of merchants, especially Pakistani merchants. The Chini Bagh was where most of them stayed, because it was from the Chini Bagh that the chartered buses left that took them and their merchandise home. The landslides that closed the only road to Pakistan had been a disaster for them. Many had to resort to reselling what they had bought in Kashgar to pay for another meal or another night at the Chini Bagh.
The Pakistani sitting next to us said his government was planning to charter several 747s to take him and his countrymen home, although he didn’t know when. Another Pakistani cautioned patience, the road would re-open in a few more days. But a Pakistani tour operator wandering the lobby said it was too dangerous, an American girl who tried to cross one of the landslides had died the previous day, and the Chinese authorities were telling everyone the road wouldn’t re-open for months, if at all.
While the Pakistanis continued trading rumors – and in truth they didn’t have anything better to do, we finished our beers and decided the hell with it. We walked down the street to buy plane tickets back to Sian via the provincial capital of Urumchi. But by the time we reached the local airline office, the front door was locked. A sign said, “Closed for lunch.” We decided to wait and joined another foreigner sitting in the shade. He was from Australia. Like us, he was waiting to buy a ticket to Urumchi to spare himself the agony of the three-day bus ride. But unlike us, he hadn’t come from Urumchi. He said he had just arrived from Islamabad.
What? Islamabad? Wasn’t the road closed? Well, yes and no. He said there were landslides all right, but there were trucks and vans waiting to carry people to the next slide. That was all we needed to hear, and back we went to the Chini Bagh to spread the news. Apparently we weren’t the only ones to meet a recent arrival from south of the border. We no sooner returned to the hotel than the front desk announced the sale of bus tickets. A convoy was leaving the next morning. All the Pakistanis sitting in the lobby rushed to the counter. As luck would have it, we just happened to be standing there and managed to come up with the first two tickets. They weren’t cheap at 150 RMB, or 30 bucks apiece, but they were tickets on a bus heading south.
And sure enough, early the next morning two hundred Pakistanis began loading what was left of their merchandise onto the roofs of the five buses that made up the convoy. It took three hours to load it all, and we didn’t leave until midday. But we left. As we followed the old city wall west out of town, no one said a word. No one believed it was actually happening. We expected to turn back any moment. But we kept going.
Once we were out of Kashgar, we entered a landscape barren of everything but rocks and began following the Ghez River upstream into a long, narrow valley of wine-red sandstone cliffs that rose straight out of the river. As the road wound higher and higher onto the Pamir Plateau, my altimeter went from 1,300 meters to 3,200. After struggling over our first pass, the driver stopped, and all the Pakistanis got out, washed their feet in the icy stream at the side of the road, unrolled their prayer mats, faced Mecca, and joined us in praying for our bus.
An hour or so later, our driver stopped again along the edge of a lake, this time for a bladder break. The Pakistanis were all dressed in their knee-length kameez shirts and squatted to pee, while Finn and I stood. But we all gazed in admiration at what was one of the most beautiful scenes in China: the snowy peaks of 7,700-meter Mount Kongur and 7,500-meter Muztagh-ata shimmering in the breathless waters of Lake Karakul. During the summer, the surrounding grasslands were dotted with the yurts and herds of the Kirghiz nomads who lived in that part of China. But it was fall, and they had moved to lower pastures.
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An hour later the sun set behind the Pamirs, and any warmth that lingered in the bus soon disappeared. To take the chill off, I reached into my pack and pulled out the first of two bottles of Chinese brandy. We were rolling along at an elevation of over 3,600 meters in what was Tajik territory. And we didn’t stop rolling until ten o’clock, when we pulled into the town of Tashkorgan.
When Ptolemy described the limits of the known world in the second century A.D., he called Tashkorgan the westernmost town in the Land of Silk, which was what the Greeks called China in those days. In those days, the inhabitants of Tashkorgan were called Sarikolis, after the river that flowed through the town. The Sarikolis were Tajiks, and unlike other groups that migrated into the area, the Sarikolis depended on agriculture and trade instead of herding. And Tashkorgan was their capital. The name meant “stone fortress,” and its ancient ruins, we were told, were on a hillside south of town. But we arrived at night.
After ten hours on the road, all we could think of was a meal and a bed. As we checked into the bus station hotel, the girl at the desk told us the road ahead was still blocked by landslides. The slides, she said, were all on the Pakistan side, and we were still a hundred kilometers short of the border. The girl added that nothing bigger than a bicycle had made it through for the past forty days and that we would have to walk sixty kilometers to get through all the slides. She laughed at the idea of our convoy making it. (continued)
[ Much more where that came from — see below and click on the image for how to purchase the publication ]
"This account has been edited from a series of 280 two-minute programs on the Silk Road Bill Porter wrote and produced for an English-language radio station in Hong Kong in 1992. We are happy to share this publication with Kyoto Journal."
