I recently left Shanghai to move back to New Zealand for a while. After posting a few boxes of things home and passing my cocktail bar on to a friend, I bought a one way ticket to Xinjiang (East Turkestan) and set out to do a little traveling round western China. The plan was to spend a month or so exploring western China, where I’ve never been, before heading home to New Zealand.

I arrived in Wulumuqi, capital of Xinjiang, late on the 20^th after a predictably delayed China Eastern flight. The flight was actually a Shanghai-Beijing flight via Wulumuqi, a strange route given that Wulumuqi is a good five hours flying time west of both Beijing and Shanghai. There was a moment of amusement a few hours into the flight as an anxious local salary man asked the flight attendant what time we would be arriving in Beijing. He did not look happy on receiving the answer – ‘tomorrow’.

Despite arriving in the evening it was still light as I headed into town. The whole of China sets its clocks to Beijing time, meaning the hours of light and darkness become a little strange in Xinjiang. The local Uigur people sometimes use an unofficial ‘xinjiang time’, two hours slower than Beijing time. The need for this ‘Xinjiang time’ becomes especially obvious in Kashgar, which must be roughly a thousand kilometers to the west of Wulumuqi.

As the taxi drove me into town I found Wulumuqi slightly more Uigur than I expected. For example Uigur script replaced Pinyin (romanized Chinese) as the second language on a lot of road signs. Besides the substantial Uigur presence the city had a typical Chinese flavor though, with the usual Chinese style high rises, as well as some Qing Dynasty pavilions dotting the central park. The Uigurs clearly dominated the part of town around the Erdaoqiao Bazaar, but the rest of the city was Chinese with a heavy sprinkling of Uigurs and a few other minorities (Khazaks, Uzbeks, Russians, etc.).

From the airport I dropped my stuff of at a hotel (the Peacock Hotel or something similar) and then headed straight to Fubar, Xinjiang’s first foreign owned bar, set up by the very helpful Jonathan from New Zealand. Fubar had an impressive selection of beers for a city as remote as Wulumuqi, with Chimay, Duvel, Kostritzer, Beamish, Boddingtons, Coopers (including the excellent stout), Hoegarden and more. I had a few Kostritzer and a massive plate of fish and chips. The chips were a touch oily but overall I was impressed given that Wulumuqi is thousands of kilometers from the nearest ocean. Johnathan gave me suggestions on places to check out in Xinjiang and I decided to visit Kashgar and Yining, then start traveling back towards China proper by following the silk road through Turpan, Dunhuang, Jiayuguan and Lanzhou. After that I wasn’t sure what the plan would be but I thought I would probably go to Sichuan.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 1:59 am and is filed under China, Xinjiang (East Turkestan). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.