FROM COMMUNISM TO CAPITALISM AND GRUMPY MONKS

We already knew that the dimensions of China were considerable, but only spending the long hours sitting on the bus and the train to go to our every time destination, we can realize how big it is...

We leave behind the province of the Xinjiang with its endless deserts and some impressive peaks that will take you all the way to Pakistan along the Karakorum Highway. For us is also the last place where muslimism is the main religion. After travelling several months in central Asia, we look forward for the change in the culture that the Eastern provinces are going to bring, but we also know that we will miss the character and the hospitality typical in the Allah worshipers whose as well as in all central Asia, also populate the Uighur province.

A few days in China are enough to comprehend that Communism has been replaced by pure Capitalism. The prices for visiting some of the sites are in a disproportion hard to believe...

With the entrance fee to visit a temple, a fortress or just to visit a lake is enough to buy your food and accommodation for the day!

Chinese people pay full price too, which with an average monthly salary of 80 Euros, makes it only affordable for rich locals and foreigners that have not been long on the road.

Quickly we cross the Gansu province, only stopping by to get our first glimpse of the great wall, and to change the original plans of visiting the town of Xiahe. After asking why, the answer that we get is that the government has forbidden any foreigner to visit the place for "safety" reasons...

Xiahe is a main pilgrimage point for Tibetans Buddhists, which make us think that maybe is for the "safety" of the Chinese government that we can not access to the information of what's really going on in Tibet.

After all that and knowing that many areas close to Tibet are going to be inaccessible for us, we drive our steps to the Sichuan province, famous lately for the massive earthquake that left many people without a home and depending on international aid.

The capital Chengdu is the first place we visit, overpopulated as we thought, we enjoy the famous province's spicy food, the traditional opera and some grumpy monks which get quite upset if you point your camera at them when the play with the last "toy" in the mobile phone market.

THE OFFICIAL REGULATIONS OF CHINA SAY...

Last hours in Kyrgyzstan, land of mountains, which seem to show all their beauty to us, maybe to make us regret the fact of leaving and cover the distance between Osh and the Irkestan pass that will take us into China.

300 kilometres in 24 hours in probably one of the worst roads in Central Asia , is quite a good timing, comparing it with some of the never ending stories that we've heard from other travellers tat we've met on the way. Tired but happy to be there, we pay the agreed price to driver and his son who accepted our cheap offer to take us up to the border in the slow but strong Kamaz (Russian truck).

The Irkestan pass is a weird isolated place at 3500m high where people live in wagons and containers piling their rubbish where they can and where the streets are formed by the endless rows of parked trucks, everyday changing, waiting for their turn to cross over.

Early in the morning we manage to get our "out" stamps from the last kyrgyz checkpoint, still not knowing what we had ahead...

After 5 hours, we are still waiting for something to happen in the endless cue of trucks forming in the road. Chinese, Kyrgyz, Tajik and some other foreigners , all with the same goal, await on this side of the fence the two hour brake that the Chinese officers enjoy everyday, which added to the two hours difference with the official Beijing time, only leave 4 hours for us to make it through before they close the border again until next day.

Devouring our books and trying to learn the first words in Chinese is how we spend the next three hours until the truck in front of us moves forward making us the next ones...

We heard many stories, " -They are really slow", "- They will check every single thing in your backpack", "-They will check even the pictures in your camera". Through all of that we went with no problem, and just when we were about to get the precious stamp and the forced "welcome to China" of the officer of the passport control, we were stopped and taken aside as if we had done something wrong... and we did... just not realize that in our guidebook, China and Taiwan have different colours as if they where different countries, so we ended having our guidebook with all the maps taken away because as they say, " In the official regulations of China, Taiwan is still part of China".

-"Yes, but we did not write the guidebook...thanks for that!" we say.

Finally in China we enjoy the 260km of desertic landscape that take us to the Silk Road city of Kasghar, with its over populated Sunday animal market, just to learn as we walk through it that the local Uyghur are very similar to the Kyrgyz and Tajiks that we just left behind on the other side of the border.