It was three-hour drive from Turpan to Urumqi. The driver appeared to go the wrong way at first, but Tony (our local guide) said he wanted to stop first and buy some local Turpan grapes. He then presented us with a big box of them as a present – they were delicious and the leftovers came in useful later in our trip!

After a two hours of driving through the desert we came to a large wind farm, where we stopped to take photographs and I encountered my first really disgusting pit toilet – even the flies recoiled.

Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, is a very modern city, which has only been built in the last fifty or so years and looks a bit like a sort of Gotham City in the middle of the desert. Tony pointed out a green park among the skyscrapers.

Our first port of call was the museum, which is best known for the mummies found in the desert. We were first shown an exhibit about the different peoples of Xinjiang (Uighur, Kazakh, Mongol, Manchu etc.), before being taken upstairs to see the famous mummies with European features, including the Loulan beauty; a woman who was buried with a small mask containing human teeth; a four year old child; and a couple from 1800 BC (she of mixed European and Mongol ethnicity, he of European.)  The textiles they were wearing were finely woven and very well preserved.

Tony then took us to lunch. We told him that we were not too hungry, so he only ordered beef with vegetables; chicken with peppers and mushrooms; Chinese leaves; cabbage with prawns (slightly worrying in the city that is distinguished for being furthest from the ocean) and soup with tofu and leaves. Goodness knows how much food we would have been offered if we admitted to being hungry.

After lunch we made a short visit to the bazaar. There were lots of raisins from Turpan, dried apricots and spices, but overall it was more like a modern shopping mall than a traditional eastern bazaar.

Tony then asked what we would like to do next, as we had time to kill before our flight to Kashgar. Having been in China for a while by this point, I now knew the ropes so I vetoed his suggestion of a visit to a carpet factory, and suggested the park which he had pointed out to us as we drove into the city. I think he thought we were mad. He said he hadn’t been there since he was ten years old, but he complied with good grace. The park turned out to be attractive, with flowers, amusements for children, stands celebrating every modern Olympic games, refreshment stands and toilets that were only marginally better than those near the wind farm.

We had a cold drink on a terrace with a great view of the city, where a PA system was (bizarrely) playing Una Paloma Blanca and then visited a pagoda which also had a good view of the city, and another smaller pagoda which marks the spot where the head of a serpent is trapped. The serpent’s tail is trapped by a pagoda on an opposite hill – if the buildings collapse, the serpent will be freed and Urumqi will be destroyed by flood.

After that, Tony got his revenge saying that as there was still some time to kill before our flight to Kashgar, we could visit the government gift shop. 

I visited Urumqi in 2007 as part of a trip long the Silk Road.