We arrived in Kashgar late at night.  The car that had brought us from the Kyrgyz border took us straight to our cheap hotel.  We dumped our bags and then headed out to get some food.  I had $25 in my pocket and was looking forward to a feast.  We asked at reception for the nearest bank - ‘just around the corner, they will open again at 10.30am tomorrow’.  Er OK, but what if we needed to get some money changed now? ‘ the bank opens in the morning tomorrow’.  Right, thanks.   There were rumours of a cash machine so we set of into the cold night.  

 

The cash machine didn’t work.  We tried to pay in dollars, that didn’t work either.  We offered $5 for a dish that would normally cost only 50c.  Nope, no good. We stomped back the hotel and dug out a bag of peanuts we’d bought back in Kyrgyzstan.  Peanuts and tea it was.  

 

The next day we wandered around the old town.  It was full of money changers and kebabs for 50c. We stocked up on cash and meat.  The old town had a great atmosphere, the people (Uighurs - not Han Chinese) look disarmingly similar to Turkish people.  Our bits of Kyrgyz/Turkish came in handy as the numbers,please and thank you are exactly the same in Uighur. One main difference was that written Uighur uses and Arabic script.  It was cool, if disorientating to see the mixture of Chinese and Arabic scripts in bright paint and neon all around the town.

 

Kashgar has always been a crossroads. It was an important link on the East-West Silk Road and the North-South route over the Karakorum Highway from Pakistan.  Suddenly we felt connected to the rest of Asia.  There was even a Pakistani restaurant serving delicious curries.  We met a Pakistani gem stone trader, he laughed as he showed us the jade he was importing into China - ‘here a lump this size would cost 500Yuan ($60) in Pakistan you can find it by the roadside or you can buy it for just a few rupees.  By the way my cousin is an MP in the UK, have you heard of him?’  We hadn’t.

 

H