My only plan for the 25^th was to see the Sunday bazaar in Kashgar and arrange transport back to Wulumuqi. I got up and headed to the bazaar. I arrived as it was still building up, with streams of Uigurs arriving in every direction, coming either on foot, or by bus, car, or donkey cart. There was scarcely a Chinese person to be seen, and very few tourists. I only saw two other western tourists, and maybe a half dozen touristy looking Chinese.

Unlike the Wulumuqi bazaar which was contained in three covered complexes, the Kashgar sprawled over a huge area. There was a main central building providing cover for permanent stalls, a couple of older, smaller and crumbling buildings containing more permanent stalls (one of which seemed more tourist oriented with Chinese jade, carpets, etc.), and a mass of temporary stalls in the surrounding open spaces and lanes, set up either under awnings or simply on the ground.

 

The market was organized into sections dealing in different goods, including clothes, tools, kitchenware, fabrics, dried foods, carpets, snacks, and so on. Some of the more interesting items were in the temporary stalls around the market. There were stalls selling handmade brushes, second hand shoe dealers, donkey bridles and accessories, knife sharpeners, and so on.

My stomach was feeling a little better and I did my best to try some of the snacks, including icecream (0.5 RMB), sausages of rice stuffed lamb entrails (1 RMB), baked lamb dumplings (1 RMB each – maybe overcharging), mutton soup with naan, sweet dried fruit soup, and freshly squeezed pomegranate juice (1 RMB). The hygine was questionable. The best the stalls seemed to do was rinse bowls and utensils with a spray bottle containing water between customers. At the lamb dumpling vendor each seat on the bench had a plate in front of it and you simply ate off the plate used by the previous dozen customers. I guess they wiped the plates either at the end of the day or once the grease got too thick. I didn’t have room for rice pilaf (手抓饭 – ‘hand eaten rice’ in Chinese) or naan soaked in lamb stew. I was going to buy some interesting half dried raisins but the price seemed high (10 RMB a small bunch) and I figured the vendor was being a jerk. I got to taste them in any case and they were nothing special, still closer to a grape than a raisin.

I thought about buying one of the knives, which were interesting and seemed available for 200 RMB or less, but figured customs might not let them into New Zealand. I did buy a bag of allegedly Uigur spiced tea. It seemed more spices than tea and I’m not sure if it really was Uigur. It seemed more like a very strong Indian Chai, and might be better drunk mixed with tea than drunk alone.

After finishing up at the market I arranged a ticket back to Wulumuqi for the next day and then took another walk around the Mosque area. This time I stopped in at the Chakhana Teahouse for tea. The place looked very authentic, almost too filthy to consider entering, with a crumbling decorative wood and plaster interior, and tables of capped and bearded old Uigur men sipping tea and chatting. I sat down and an English menu was produced - probably the only menu in the place since it seemed patronized mainly by regulars of several decades who had no need for a menu. The English menu indicated that a fair number of tourists must find their way into the place, but there were none in evidence when I was there. I tried to ask for milk tea, which was not on the menu, and the waiter had enormous trouble understanding me. Tea was no problem (‘chai’ in Uigur and ‘cha’ in Chinese), but the milk was impossible to explain. I tried using my hands to make horns on my head and squeezing my tits, but it was all to no avail until an old man at the next table got my meaning and told the waiter.

The milk tea was odd. It was weak Uigur tea diluted with a smooth and yoghurt like ‘milk’. The main taste was the sourness of the ‘milk’, with almost no tea taste. I am not quite sure about the whole milk tea situation in Xinjiang. Shanghai restaurants serve reasonably strong black tea, milk, and salt as ‘Uigur tea’. As I later found out though after drinking it in Xinjiang true Uigur tea (or at least Xinjiang tea since maybe it is really Kazakh) is weak tea mixed with a slightly sour milk curd product. The Chakhana Teahouse version had roughly the right taste but was smooth rather than curd filled and the ‘milk’ seemed to be some type of slightly processed concentrate. Maybe this just isn’t a drink they usually sell and so they used a long lasting processed type of milk, different from the curd filled stuff served in more specialized milk tea shops. I figured any tea shop would sell milk tea but maybe they don’t.

There was not much else to do in Kashgar besides check out the old British and Russian consulates. Both are now located inside hotels, but neither was particularly interesting since both were being renovated and therefore closed up.

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