Across the Chinese Border and Back Again Part 2: Staying at Muztag Ata and Karakul Lake along the Karakoram Highway

If you click on the link below, do you see the mountain symbol with “Mustagata” between Kashgar and Tashgergan on the map? That’s where this story takes place.

Map of where we were

The spellings are slightly different on the map than the ones I use below, as place names are often transliterated into different languages in various ways, as indicated below:

English: Muztag Ata (Literally, “Ice Mountain Father”)

Local: Muztagh Ata

Chinese: Mushitage Feng

English: Karakul Lake (means, “Black Lake”)

Local: Qara Kol

Chinese: Kalakulei Hu

English: Karakoram Highway

LocalF: Karakorm Tashyol

Chinese: Zhongba Gonglu or Kelakunlun Gonglu

NOTE: When I say "Turkish" I'm referring to the local Turkish dialect that is spoken in northwest China, not the language they speak in the country of Turkey.

I’m traveling with a lovely French couple, Flo and Mag, who I met at the international youth hostel in Kashgar. They are super cool, and invite me to come with them on an excursion along the Karakoram Highway to Tashkurgan, a town near the Chinese-Pakistani border. We decide to stop for the night at Karakul Lake, at the foothills of Muztag Ata, on the way.

Here’s our story:

The bus ride from Kashgar to Karakul Lake is peppered with red billboards of screaming Chinese propaganda, yelling at us in loud yellow characters: Strive your best to construct harmonious solidarity and improve civilization! Love your country! Ethnic solidarity, liberation and improvement, mutual cooperation!

Besides the billboards, the scenery along the Karakoram Highway is unexpectedly jaw-dropping gorgeous, with clear blue skies, snow-capped mountains, and a bright blue lake along the way.

Here is a picture I took outside the window of the bus.

I’m just about to fall asleep when the bus driver announces, “We’re here!” Six hours later and we’ve arrived at Karakul Lake, a supposedly famous lake that we’d read about in Lonely Planet.

The gorgeous mountain view of Muztag Ata notwithstanding, the lake itself anticlimactic. I’d heard about this lake so much from all the tour guide books, and here it was, a pretty small lake in the middle of a valley. I felt the same about Mt. Rushmore and the Terracotta Warriors. I hear so much about them and then I get there and I can’t help thinking, “that’s it?”

I jump out of my seat, “We’re here already!” While we are grabbing our stuff, the only Chinese guy on the bus says the first thing to me all day. He was silent for the entire trip except for when the bus driver asked him in Chinese, “Where are you from?,” which was the only time Chinese was spoken during the entire trip. He answered “Wuhan [a city in eastern China]” and ducked his head down.

He asks me in English, “Is this Kalakulei [using the Chinese name] Lake?” I say, “Yes, we’re getting off here” in English because I remembered that earlier I had told the other people on the bus that I didn’t speak Chinese and didn’t want to blow my cover. We get off the bus and are immediately surrounded by at least 20 men yelling in English, “Come live in my yurt! Free horse to go back home! We have yurt! Will you stay here tonight? Come live in my yurt!,” like flies swarming on a piece of meat. Or three pieces of meat...

I squat down to put my phone back in my purse and a guy squats next to me, shoving a piece of paper in my face with a single sentence written in English: “Yurt homestay with family, dinner and breakfast included.” I ask him in Turkish, “Which ethnicity are you?” and he said “Kirghiz.”

He is a Kirghiz-Chinese. That is, ethnic Kyrgyz with Chinese citizenship. Luckily him and the other Kirghiz men surrounding us can speak and understand Turkish, so we use that to communicate. Kirghiz and the local dialect are both classified in the Turkish language family, and though mutually incomprehensible, are very similar (perhaps analogous to the difference between Spanish and Italian).

Two other French guys we had met earlier at the hostel recommended that we stay with a guy named Hali, who would be wearing a baseball cap. We look around. All of the guys are wearing caps. At one point amongst the chaos, one of the guys says, “Two French guys just stayed with me!” Bingo! So we ask him,

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“What’s your name?”

“Hali.”

“Were the French people guys or girls?”

“Guys.”

He passes the test with flying colors and matches the description given to us by the French guys perfectly. We bargain and he agrees almost immediately. “Ok! Free horse take you home,” he said. I get on one horse and Mag and Flo get on the other.

While we ride the horses along the edge of the highway, a countless number of huge army pickup trucks are going by carrying bricks and the horses are scared.

We chat a bit. Hali is 21, unmarried, Kirghiz, with one older brother and one younger brother, he went to Kirghiz school, and has been to Kyrgyzstan once. After a 20-minute ride on the horses (my legs were so sore!), we arrive at Hali’s home.

When we arrive, there are yaks and sheep everywhere in the area surrounding the home, and Hali’s mother is milking the yaks. I ask Hali where the bathroom is and he makes a wide, sweeping gesture 180 degrees around: “This is your bathroom. All of it. You can go anywhere here. As long as I can’t see you, you’re fine,” indicating the entire area surrounding his home. There were big rocks and mounds of sand all around one can go behind.

We go inside his home and I greet his mother with, “Assalamu Aleykum!” I share the naan, samsa, and peanuts that I’ve brought, and they share tea, bread, and yak milk yogurt. We are starving and chilly, but the tea warms us up and the yogurt is fatty and filling.

As we ate, Hali asks us several times, “Let’s go to the glacier [referring to Muztag Ata] on the moto!” It sounds nice but then we ask if it’s free, and he says “No, 100 kuai per person.” We think that’s too expensive.

We tell him that we want to first take a walk around the area, and this phrase he knows very well and he repeats “walk around” several times in English. He follows us out and then asks us if we will go around the lake in his moto for 50 kuai a person, and we say, “No, we are students and we don’t have a lot of money.” He responds, “Okay, 100 kuai a person, and I take you to the glacier and then around the lake as well.” We feel awkward and uncomfortable about his constant pressing to get us to spend more money. On the one hand, we feel bad that we aren’t giving him more business, but on the other hand it’s kind of annoying that he keeps pressing the issue after we tell him we’re not interested. But we really can’t afford it, so we go walking on our own to the lake, chatting about life, the universe, and everything.

After our walk, we come back inside and chat while Hali’s mother prepares dinner.

From left to right, Flo, me, and Mag, sitting in Hali’s home (in the kitchen/dining room/living room area), chatting with the family waiting for dinner.

Hali’s mother tells us that cooking is very inconvenient, tiresome, and burdensome (japaliq) because they don’t have electricity and have no other option but to cook on a single yak poop burning stove.

She beams with pride when she talks about her three sons, and smiles shyly when I tell her that the French guys told us how nice and hospitable they are, and had recommended them to us.

We ask Hali about the tourists coming through here, because we are curious how often they have people stay with them. He tells us, “We’ve been doing this business for 10 years. Almost everyday we have guests come and stay here, lots of Han people but some foreigners too. Yesterday we had 5 Japanese people stay here. I’m used to it now. Everyday is the same. I go and wait for tourists by the bus and then bring them back to my house and look after them, taking them around the lake or to Muztag Ata. It’s not too busy, it’s just normal. There are about 3 cyclists coming down the highway each week, mostly foreigners.”

We sit on the carpet and Hali and his younger brother sit on the bed next to the carpet staring at us. His younger brother is 17-years old and has finished school, and occupies most of his time with chores around the house and farm.

I ask them if they went to Kyrgyz, Turkish or Chinese school, and Hali replies, “I went to a Kirghiz school, which is about 200 kilometeres from here.” I ask them why the Tajik people we met went to Turkish school, and he replies, “The Tajik in China don’t have their own writing system so they have to go to Turkish school. But we have our own writing system, we use the Arabic alphabet. So we have our own schools here in China.”

They look at my Turkish textbook and are super curious about it, reading things out loud to themselves and trying to read the English, and everyone in the room bursts out laughing.

We have a conversation with an older male relative of the family, I think he might be Hali’s cousin. He starts talking about the two things that a lot of people I’ve met here like to talk about: marriage and money. “You Americans have a lot of money, but aren’t happy. We don’t have money, but we have time, we have family, and we are happy. But it’s not good. We need money too.” He tells us that it costs 50,000 yuan to get married, which includes the bride's dowry, the celebration itself, and the husband and wife’s new home.

We had perhaps foolishly been wondering, “So they host people almost every day. And it’s 100 kuai a night to stay. What do they need all the money for? They have everything here on this seemingly self-sustainable farm: sheep for meat, yaks for milk and fuel. What is the point of earning all of this money, what do they use it for?” I know I was genuinely flabbergasted why they would put themselves through the trouble, especially since the mother was complaining about how much work it was.

But suddenly we understand why they need this work. Because they’re saving up for their sons’ marriages. Also, they only have this business during the summer months, 5 months a year at the most.

We talk about why and how I’m not married yet. As a single woman of 26, I get that question a lot, accompanied by horrified stares or looks of pity. Since they are asking me about my love life, I ask about the boys’ marriage prospects and they both smile wide and giggle and look down at the floor shyly, and we ask them, “how will life change when you get married?” and he says he will have his own house, but he will stay in the village, not go to the city.

We sit and talk and they are endlessly curious about money: how much does university cost? how much does a house cost? how much does a wedding cost? how much money to you and your parents earn per month?

We play with the kitten and eat the snacks we brought, and just hang out chatting. Maybe my Turkish is better or maybe worse than I think--I know I’m making a lot of grammar mistakes. But somehow I am helping them translate as we are having a conversation, but my brain gets tired, especially when it comes to their questions about money.

The 17-year old younger brother is wide-eyed staring and curious at us the whole time. Flo offers him a cigarette and his mom says, “No he’s not allowed,” but Hali takes one, and they go outside to smoke together. The mom starts preparing a dinner, a stew of potatoes, beans, tomatoes, and peppers served over rice.

Even if they have foreigners here a lot, I’m still very conscious of the fact that I’m in someone else’s home. I ask them permission for everything and feel so much more comfortable with my headscarf on and following other polite mannerisms. They tell me I look like a Turkish or a Tajik girl.

But whenever we worry about not being polite, we keep telling ourselves that if they’d had foreigners coming here everyday for the past 10 years, then we don’t really need to worry about niceties. They’ve probably seen everything under the sun.

After dinner, it’s beautiful as I look out onto the mountains as I pee and brush my teeth. This must be the most beautiful bathroom in the entire world, I think to myself.

The sun wakes me up around 7 am local time, 9 am Beijing time. I get out of bed and go to the “bathroom.” The yak and sheep are grazing, snow capped mountains in the background, green grass, blue sky, white clouds, and humble mud-brick homes surround me.

I go back inside and I see his mother in the living room, so I greet her and she asks if I slept well. She tells me to sit, and I do, and she makes me tea and Hali brings out the food I brought. I drink the salty milk tea and dip the stale garlic naan into it. The bread gets soggy and is savory on my tongue and filling in my stomach. I sit there by myself for awhile, as the mom walks in and out, putting yak milk in bottles and pouring a big silver bowl of homemade yogurt into a plastic container. Hali walks in and out, and his cousin sits there for a little while I eat. I ask if he’s eaten and he says yes. He’s exhausted of questions and so am I.

Hali tells us that it’s better to leave in the morning and try to get a car or bus to Tashkurgan now, because there are a lot more cars in the morning and it will be a lot cheaper. So we pack up our stuff, I brush my teeth in the “bathroom,” and I write a letter in English for Hali: “HOMESTAY: I have two horses that can take you to my house for free, my mother will make you dinner and breakfast, and you can sleep at my house for the night!” I had seen one of these letters shoved in my face yesterday, so I understood exactly what he wanted and wrote him a letter, hoping that it would be helpful for him in getting foreign tourists, who were probably willing to pay more money than locals.

The mother even gave me a gift before I left, a green stone for a necklace. We say our pleasantries and walk away, waving, and Hali says in English, “See you later!” Hali points to a big white building that I think is a hotel and says to walk in that direction for the bus. We start walking a little off in the exact direction and he comes by on his horse, beckoning us to walk towards him. And so we do, he shows us where there is a break in the fence for us to walk to. Do you see that building? Walk towards it okay? He goes off on the horse toward the lake.

As we walk away from the house, on our way to the next leg of our journey, Flo says to us, “Can you believe it? We’re two French people in China… staying with a Kyrgyz family speaking Turkish translated by an American girl in a Tajik autonomous county near the Pakistan border…”

Here is a picture of me in front of Muztag Ata.