Turpan: Karezy like Kerouac in the Taklamakan

Turpan is the hottest place in China and the second lowest depression in the world (154 m below sea level). Turpan belongs to the category of silk road towns that were once epicenters of trade and adventure but are now wastelands in the desert. As we drive from the train station to the main town, we pass stretches of the Taklamakan desert.

I ask the driver to play a cd I bought in Morocco and I suddenly feel transported to the High Atlas. The desert landscape is eerily similar. We arrive in Turpan proper; the synthetic sounding syncopation of Berber voices blaring into the hot desert air. The drab utilitarian architecture we see for miles is suddenly broken by trellised vines. I feel I am in Cyprus. We spend the evening walking around this oasis town aimlessly and have a quite night reading and trying to get our bearings straight. There seems to be no other travelers in Turpan.


The next day we decide to hire a driver and vehicle to drive around the city. Our driver Kalak Khan picks up two exotic looking Uighur women on the road. KK claims that one is his girlfriend and the other his friend and that they have come for fun. One is Khaddariya (Arabic for one who offers respect to Allah) and the other is Gul Noor (Arabic for rose jewel). Our first stop is Emin Minaret founded by Emin Hoja in the late 18th century.

Outside the minaret, a Uighur woman tries to sell me a cd of local music and then offers me pictures of Moa. Mao, a larger than life iconic figure in history had become trinketized in the desert. CD or Mao? Maybe necklace for my girlfriend instead of Mao. I decide on a necklace. If I ever become (in) famous I hope I am never subjected to this calculus of consumption. But it is an inescapable fate. Bach and Mozart have become musak and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare can be bought on the pavement of MG Road where they lie in the esteemed company of Deepak Chopra , Osho, Scott Peck and the Harvard Business Review (new age punters of psychobabble and business pornography). But I degrees….

Our next stop is the Jiaohe Ruins. The heat gets unbearable and so we decide to eat watermelons and abandon any pretence of being interested in the ruins. Jiahoe means
“confluence of rivers.” However, we find ourselves at the confluence of sweat and heat!
We visit a museum on the Karez, an irrigation system that is over 2000 years old; one that originated in Iran and spread to China and all over the Iberian Peninsula. I don’t quite understand the mechanics of the system but in essence, people have found an ingenious way to get water from the melting snow at Mount Tian Shan all the way into the desert.

We break for lunch and over lunch, Kalak Khan hands us a bag of crushed grapes. As we eat them unsuspectingly, KK and his girls giggle. I have eaten a handful of grapes and Arjun has eaten four times as much. As lunch concludes I suddenly feel my head spinning. Arjun is laughing ecstatically and his eyes are blood shot. We have unwittingly consumed a drug of sorts. The rest of the day is a blur. I remember spending many hours laughing as KK and his girls speed in an out of narrow streets with Uighur music in the background. It seems like, theatre. We eventually get dropped off at our hotel, gather our belongings sloppily and make our way to the bus station on rented bicycles! Arjun decides to circumambulate the bus station over 200 times and says that he feels engulfed in a “ring of cold blue flame.” I finally manage to get him on the bus and we leave Turpan for the next oasis town on the silk road.

On the bus, my head starts spinning again. When I close my eyes, I see fabulous yellow roman candles explode like spiders across the stars and in the middle I see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww.