Salve Tartaria

Returning from Shipton’s Arch with just one final night in Kashgar, there was only one activity left to undertake – which was to get changed into desert-issue number 1s and repair back to Chini Bagh for photographs before seeking refreshment.

A final blockade waits for us the next day. The mixture of travel and time differences means that despite a wander around town earlier in the day, we have not realised we are trying to get a cab to the airport in the middle of Friday. The roads are almost literally empty and it comes together that we have seen screeds of men pouring into the town’s various mosques. One chap even stops me to check I know where I’m going, should I be Moslem. The only drivers and women or Han.

It has been just on two weeks across from Dunhuang to Kashgar; certainly the slow and long way. Altogether an overland journey of around 2,000km, allowing for our shortcut across the Kumtagh.

While all parts had proven easier than initially thought – more accessible, more developed – this was impossible to judge from a distance and even now we’re not entirely sure what our status was while travelling quietly across Lop Nur.

The explorer Sven Hedin, who was the heir to the earlier late nineteenth century explorers of this region and spent decades in and out of Central and Inner Asia, wrote a series of books on his experiences in what is now Xinjiang in the 1930s – The Trail of War, The Silk Road and The Wandering Lake. In the latter he writes:

"It had been my dream, as I have said, to revive and open for motor traffic the old Silk Road, abandoned for 1,600 years [since around 330 AD when rivers and lakes changed and towns and routes were left for mor hospitable ones], which had led from China proper via Tun-hwang, Lop Nur, Lou-lan and the Kum-daria to Kashgar."

This is the original heart of the Silk Road and, in many ways thankfully, a full road route has still not been achieved. There are certainly roads that will take you most of this way now – but hopefully the unmarked desert crossing will remain an essential part of it if you want to travel from Dunhuang across Lop to the southern Tarim.

As Hedin writes also in this book: "Then, as now, the fascination of the enterprise lay in the pregnant question, "Will it come off or not?". Unusually for us, this time it seems to have worked. But that just goes to show, it wasn’t quite hard enough.

We’ll have to work on this for next time.