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.
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