My travel diaries
Wednesday 22 August, 2007 - Kashgar, Xinjiang, China
I spend most of the morning and the early part of the afternoon sleeping. It seems the exhaustion from our successful summit attempt four days ago is finally beginning to catch up with me now that I have a proper bed to sleep in.
At 4 o'clock I meet Lindsay, Toby, Orna and Juliet in John's Café. Toby has now shaved off the beard that he grew on Muztag Ata, but for some reason has decided to keep his moustache, so he now looks like a ginger Tom Selleck. We are still in John's Café when David arrives with Abdullah and the sherpas having finished clearing the mountain of all our remaining tents and gear. One by one the rest of our team join us there. Geoff has had his head shaved and looks like Sir Clive Sinclair. There's lots of confusion over the two time zones, Beijing time and "local" time, which is 2 hours different. Officially everything is supposed to run on Beijing time, and all clocks seem to be set to it, but all of the local Uighur population run on the more sensible "local" time (Kashgar is 3000km west of Beijing). After much discussion, we synchronise our watches to local time.
Later that evening Orna takes us to a local Uighur restaurant she found when she was exploring the city earlier in the day. It doesn't serve beer or have a toilet, but she takes charge of our order and we are brought dish after dish of meat, kebab, meat, more meat and, finally, more kebab. I feel like waving the white flag again, but can usually be prevailed upon to eat just a little bit more.Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 Next
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