40 Hours on a Train in China! First Experience of Uyghur Culture | Xinjiang, China

Welcome back! Sorry for the delay in this post! We have been travelling quite intensly the last week and haven't had a chance to upload anything from this trip! In the last post we hitchhiked to Chengdu in a minivan with people from an ethnic group and spent a few days checking out different places in Chengdu. Here is a picture of us and the sweet people that gave us a ride into the city!

After spending some time in Chengdu it was time to get our 40 hour train to Hami also known as Kumul 2000 km away in the desert! In order to book train tickets in China online you need to go through a company that we book them for you and we did this a week earlier just to be sure that we would get bunks together in the same spot. The tickets cost 150$ + 10$ booking fee! A bit more expensive than hitchhiking but if we wanted to see anything other than roads on this trip and actually get to enjoy and explore different places we needed to cheat a little bit as our visa only lasted 30 days.

We got the local bus out to the train station, which in itself was an experience, and then queued up to acquire our tickets which weren't in the same building so we had to go to another building to collect before going back once again through the major security check-points (even managed to get my knife for cooking through).

We sat down in a very crowded waiting hall before heading off to catch our train. In preparation for our extremely long train ride we had bought a varied selection of food including: pot noodles, flavoured bread, fruit, snacks and of course we had our Aeropress to make coffee on the train! Who wouldn't, right?

In our little open cabin there we 6 beds, Malin was on a bottom bunk and I was on the top bunk. I can tell you that the top bunks are not made for being able to sit up, if you do so you will be in for a sharp awakening! Opposite myself was a bigger guy and even when he was sleeping on his side there was barely space for him! His snoring definitely helped us sleep!

We left in the evening so we didn't see too much of the surroundings as we were departing from Chengdu but we certainly woke up to a different type of landscape. Gone were the lush green hills and in their place was the dry sandy desert!

We spent a lot of the time either reading, listening to music, playing cards or watching something on the computer. Our neighbours were friendly enough but didn't seem too interested in chatting to us. After the first 24 hours we were a bit bored of our pot noodles and managed to bag some nice tomatoes from a lady selling them on the train. They were super juicy and really tasty!

One thing we noticed was how we wanted to be really comfortable for such a long train ride but if you look at the photo above you can see our neighbour and her outfit does not really appear to be too comfy and even some of the guys were in jeans and shirts! Still everyone is different.

After two nights and one day on the train we finally arrived in Hami (Kumul). We were happy to finally be off the train and were looking forward to checking into a comfy room and then heading out to see what could be done in the city. Our plan didn't really work out to well though... As we were leaving the train station we noticed that we would have to pass through a police security check-point, no problem we thought, we thought wrong! They took us aside, asked where we were going to stay, where we were from, why we were in Xinjiang province (this is a whole topic for another post!) and then they held our passports for a good 30 minutes without saying too much to us. Feeling a little worried we tried to work out what was the hold up and they said they were waiting for a patrol car to come and pick us up and to take us to our hotel! OK? We had planned on walking but apparently that wasn't popular.

They took us to our hotel which is where our next issue started... As we have mentioned in previous posts you often need to check which hotels accomodate tourists before going to a city and this was exactly what we had done before getting the train. Our couchsurfing host's girlfriend had rung the hotel and confirmed that we could stay and had even rung the local police station, which also confirmed. Here is the funny part, when we tried to get a room they said they didn't accomodate tourists!!! After a lot of back and forth they told us we could register at the nearest police booth. The security guard walked us there and we managed to register.

After finally being able to check-in it was time for a spot of lunch and what better food to get than the local version of a noodle soup. In Xinjiang province noodles are made a little differently and the flavours that are used tend to be more middle eastern due to the ancient silk route that passed through this area and we were not disappointed! WOW, really tasty!

After our delicious lunch we decided to check out some of the local sights. One of the places of interest was 'Hami Museum'. It holds lots of information about the history of the area dating back to pre-historic times. When we arrived it was closed and we asked some local guys what time it would open and of course we had to take a picture together!

Whilst waiting for the museum to open we went for a wander around the are for some water and ended up coming across this small cemetery. It appeared to be pretty old and was made from mudbricks and it was really interesting to walk around it and experience this history first hand (turned out to be more interesting than the museum!). This was our first taste of Uyghur culture and history.

The museum was quite interesting and was inexpensive and we spent about an hour in there before heading back into the city centre where we happened upon one of our best meals we had in China. The name of the food is Rou jia mo (肉夹馍) and translated means 'meat in a bun'. It was absolutely delicious! Crispy, moist , spicey and so flavoursome that we actually came back again the following day to have some more! We only stayed two nights in Hami and as this part of China is famous for fruit like grapes, melons, apricots and peaches, we stocked up in preparation for our hitchhiking journey through the desert!

Check back for the next post where we start our adventure into the desert to hitchhike!

This is the route for this part of our journey. We couldn't get the map to show the route from the train but you get an idea of the distance we went on the train.

If you are interested in our route you can find it here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1dKeTjIFM0cgSP2Wefp8L3ZvOgTE&usp=sharing

If you would like to watch our episode from this part of our trip you can see it below.

Thanks again everyone for taking the time to read our post and if you have any questions please feel free to ask us!

Alex and Malin

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