Day 114: From Kyrgyzstan to China over the Torugart Pass

I made the decision when I first arrived in Kyrgyzstan that I would try and cross into China over the Torugart Pass.  Not only is this 3600m pass extremely remote and susceptible to snowstorms year-round, but as a “Class 2” Chinese border crossing it’s meant for commercial freight traffic only – tourists are not officially allowed to use the route.  The one way around this bureaucracy is to arrange transport on both sides of the border, which I dutifully did with the help of a tour operator in Naryn.

My company on this little adventure were three Israeli backpackers (Lots of Israelis here! Just like there were lots of French in Iran.).  We woke up at 5am, had an extremely early breakfast, and by 6am we were on the road in a pretty decent looking but old Audi.  The asphalt quickly disappeared as we left Naryn and we were back onto rough dirt roads torn apart by all the trucks that we passed.  The scenery was gorgeous though – wide, empty fields backing onto an impressive mountain range with peaks well over 4000m.  And the Torugart Pass was on the other side.

We did have one stop along the way, after some three hours of driving.  We took a side-road and drove 15km into one of the valleys to the old caravanserai at Tash Rabat.  What a caravanserai is doing all the way up here, well off the Silk Road route, no-one knows.  But it was a worthy side-trip.

It was another three hours to the border post.  We passed a few checkpoints along the way, but we were generally had the road to ourself apart from the odd Chinese truck coming down from the pass.  It was snowing lightly at the top, but not enough to put our crossing at risk.  The Kyrgyz border post was nothing special – a bunch of decrepid buildings, lots of barbed wire etc. – and we quickly passed customs and immigration.  Around a few more bends in the road and on the other side of a small ridge was the first of three Chinese border posts.  After a cursory glance at our passports the soldiers waved us on, so we changed vehicles (our Chinese vehicle was waiting there – thank God!), said goodbye to our silent, chain-smoking Kyrgyz driver, and headed down from the pass.

    
(L) A sneaky shot taken from the car at the first Kyrgyz checkpoint.  (R) The first Chinese checkpoint just over the other side of the Torugart Pass.

A few km’s down the valley was the second checkpoint, and our bags were x-rayed in a brand-new portable x-ray machine (it was soon to become obvious just how much money the Chinese has pumped into western provinces…).  It was another 100kms down to the official border control, and compared to Kyrgyzstan the dirt roads were a joy to travel on.  The border control was a shiny, new, building that looked like it was trying too hard and everything was very Chinese, serious and official.  But we had no problems – apart from one guy being asked to remove the contraband and politically-sensitive map of Taiwan from his Lonely Planet!

After another few hours on some brand new asphalt roads and concrete highways (what a luxury!) we arrived in Kashgar, which was NOTHING like I expected it to be.  I had visions of a hippie-era dusty town full of Central Asian sights, smells and sounds, but it’s a pretty big metropolis that looks and feels much like any other Chinese city – my first impression anyway.  The Chinese have bulldozed wide roads through even the Old Town and generic multi-storey buildings line the streets.  There are also many more Han Chinese here than I expected, and much less Arabic writing than I thought there’d be.  But more on that next time…