We left the fertile land behind, hopped on the train in the middle of the night…
…and woke up on the Kazakh steppe, where they apparently managed to find some monstrous fish to sell.
As always, I also managed to find some starving stray to feed and ended up starving myself the rest of the journey (I was not tempted by that fish). You can also see our conductor, a woman!!! Meaning spotlessly clean toilets and no forced dehydration.
On the border to China, they thoroughly looked at every piece of our luggage and a white coat doctor came in and pointed some kind of laser to our foreheads? They asked for maps and were very confused to find about ten packages of Chinese tea in my bag, like bringing sand to Sahara you might think, but it’s actually not that easy to find good organic tea in China, which I simply can’t manage without (sounding like some eccentric, posh English lady).
Our destination was Urumqi, which not many people have a lot of good things to say about. I suppose it looks a lot like this, but luckily we are very easy to please and we really enjoyed, what felt like, being the only foreigners in town.
There is always some delicious local cuisine to marvel at.
We had some amazing food in Urumqi, although we left these H5N1 creatures to our imagination.
Urumqi is an Islamic region and we found lots of Chinese mosques, which we had never seen before.
We didn’t find a single person that spoke English but our hotel had very helpful signs.
Words of wisdom. To be continued, for sure.
* Fun fact: Steven Seagal has apparently done a cover of “Slow boat to China”. Hehe.