Part 6: Crossing the border

Kashgar -> Osh, Kyrgyzstan (click here for a map)

After our epic meal upon our return to Kashgar yesterday, I slept on the porch of the youth hostel last night, and I wake up to the sounds of three of the hostel kittens (not to be confused with hostile kittens) playing and fighting, jumping across tables and running around my head. And when they wrestle with each other, it reminds me of jiujitsu.

We leave at 7:30 am local time (9:30 am Beijing time). When we step out of the front doors of the hostel, the bright sunlight smacks me in the face and makes me squint. We’re on the road again! Less than 24 hours after getting back from Tashkurgan, we’re ready to continue our travels to Kyrgyzstan.

“Do you mind if we get a taxi to the bus station?,” Mag asks. “I’m really tired.”

“Nope, that’s fine,” I say. We look at the map of Kashgar that the hostel gave us. A black square with two circles on the bottom for wheels has been drawn around the words, “international bus station.” I had walked there the week before planning on buying bus tickets to Osh, before I realized that the bus was over 500 RMB and 22 hours long. I’d read online that it was cheaper and faster to take a taxi and hitchhike with truckers across the border. When I first read about this online, I thought to myself, “That sounds horribly stressful, potentially dangerous and inefficient, with a high risk of getting ripped off and/or lost along the way. I’d rather take the bus while listening to audiobooks and sleeping the whole way.”

One night I was eating dinner at the hostel (they made very delicious meals of Chinese style vegetable dishes for very cheap, which is nice when you’re craving veggies which happens to me a lot in these parts) and talking with Flo and Mag, and they said, “we might go to Kyrgyzstan using taxis and hitchhiking next week, you’re more than welcome to come!”

I thought about it and talked to several other international travelers, who said, “You definitely don’t want to take the bus! So expensive and so boring!”

So we get in the taxi and he starts going in the opposite direction of the international bus station. I ask him and he says, “Yes, of course we’re going in the right direction, but are you sure you don’t want to go to the train station?” I say, “No, not the train station, the international bus station.” I say as clearly and as slowly as possible since my handle on the local language is still pretty shaky.

“Are you sure? I don’t think there are any more busses going to Kyrgyzstan right now....”

“No it’s okay, we’re going to get a taxi from the bus station.”

“Oh ok, I gotcha,” he says.

So he takes us to the DOMESTIC bus station. And we’re fuming. I’m fuming, they’re fuming, we’re all fuming and we get out of the taxi without any intention to pay. But he looks so desperate and so upset, begging me to pay him the 5 kuai and so I do anyway. That 5 kuai is not as important to me as it is to him and it’s his job and his car and his gas money and his rent he has to pay on the car.

So we get in another car and the first fishy thing about this guy is that 1. he claims that he doesn’t know where or what Kyrgyzstan is, and I have never met a local who doesn’t know that country. 2. He seems completely clueless about where the international bus station is, repeating the name of it over and over again and pointing to the domestic bus station across the street, saying, “are you sure you don’t mean that one?” We load our huge backpacks in the car and get all settled in.

Then he turns to me with a smile on his face and says, “ok, so how about 30 kuai to take you there?” And I said, “no, you need to use the meter, I’ve been there on foot and it’s actually pretty close to here, so no we will not pay 30 kuai.” He insists on the 30 kuai and I, much to my embarrassment, start to scream, “NO!” at him.

So we get out of the taxi and we walk to the closest intersection, and get in another taxi. About 50 meters down the road, the car *literally* breaks down. The driver gets out, lifts up the front hood, fiddles around with something for a few minutes, get back in and tries to start the engine. No go. He gets out again. Fiddles, gets back in. No go. So we decide to finally get out of the taxi and we get another taxi. We takes us where we want to go, to where it says international bus station on the map.

We get out of taxi #4 of the morning and I ask three men sitting underneath a sun pavilion tent about the bus station and as I listen to them talk about the situation with each other, a realization dawns on me. The international bus station isn’t here. It must have moved. I confirm this with them and ask them where it moved. To the train station.

Suddenly everything starts to make sense. That’s why the first guy wanted to take us to the train station and why the second guy wanted 30 kuai. It’s already 8:30 am local time at this point and we’re starting to run out of time- we want to get to the border control before they close for lunch at 11 am local time (they take a long lunch break at the border from 11 am to 2 pm local time).

We can take the bus or another taxi to the train station and try to get a taxi from there. But it will be 9:30 by then… A man in his fifties with bright green eyes wearing a grey suit offers to take us to Wuqia, the town closest to the border, for 50 kuai each. I start to cry.

Flo and Mag are like, “What happened? What’s going on?” I hadn’t translated for them what was going on yet or shared with them my new realization. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay Sarah,” they assure me. I tell them what I’ve just learned. We’re getting desperate. I say through my teary eyes and wobbly sobbing voice, wiping my tear stained cheeks, “We’re students, help us out, we have no money… 30 kuai a person...please...”

Probably a little more dramatic than necessary but I was genuinely upset. Some of the men who have started to form a crowd around us, cajole the man into lowering the price (“C’mon, man, they’re students, cut her a break!”) and he walks away towards his car. We follow him, and I’m thinking he’s agreed to our price. I confirm with him one more time and he says, “Ok, 40 kuai a person but I’ll take you all the way to the border so you won’t have to get another taxi in Wuqia.” We agree.

A woman with a light pink, sheer headscarf and a missing front tooth joins Flo and Mag in the backseat. We’re on our way, and Flo starts to sing, “Everything’s gonna be alright.” We all start to laugh uncontrollably again. The comic relief is welcomed.  

I tell the man, “yeah we met some bad guys this morning and we just got ourself in a really bad situation so we’re laughing and happy now that we’re okay.”

About 30 minutes into the trip, he says, “Our older sister is going to Atush,” referencing the lady in the pink headscarf. We thought that she was going all the way to Atush and had a little argument about with the driver about it, showing the driver on a tablet how Atush was in the opposite direction of where we were going. The driver just says, “Oh ok the foreigners are getting out their GPS to tell us something we don’t know about our own country. They don’t understand that the road is the same. It’s okay they came across some bad people earlier so now they are having a hard time trusting.”

It turns out that our “older sister” just needed to get off on the road that we were going and would be going to Atush by bus. I don’t know why he didn’t just say that in the first place.

He drives us to a checkpoint with two uniformed armed guards, the last point in China our driver is allowed to enter. We ask the guards with their military camouflage if we can pass through this gate on foot and they say, “yes, yes of course.” So we pay the driver, and show our passports to the guards (check #1). “Do you see that red flag over there?” The guard asks me in Chinese, pointing to the Chinese flag in the distance, flapping in the wind. “You want to go to that building with the national flag.”

“Hooray, our last bit of China!” Flo says.

We look behind us and see that there are two other backpackers walking toward us. Two other western travelers are also trying to leave China today!

So we get to the building, the one with the red flag. The guards there take our passports again. Check #2. They walk off with them.

We wait for our passports in a waiting area while a lady from Kyrgyzstan with a pot belly and a black dress with white rhinestones on it screams into a cell phone in Russian and Kyrgyz and tries to exchange 100 yuan bills for 10 clearly fake bills of 10 yuan. She carries a huge stack of 10 yuan bills and starts counting them in the waiting area.

According to Chinese law, we have to hire a taxi driver (no hitchhiking allowed) to take us across the 150-mile stretch of land across the desert that lies between the Chinese border control, where our passport would be stamped with an exit stamp, and actually entering Kyrgyzstan. These drivers are hired by professional companies whose sole purpose and responsibility is to make sure that the people who have an exit stamp actually leave the country.

A taxi driver hanging out it in the waiting room of the customs hall offers to take us there. He’s asking for 130 kuai a person to take us to the Kyrgyz border. We bargain with him, trying to get him to go down to 100 a person, and hoping another person will show up who we can share the taxi with. It’s getting close to lunchtime and the border will close soon. But we wait, and finally the Kyrghyz woman talks to him (he was Kyrgyz-Chinese) and confirms with us that he will not budge.

We count our money: we have enough loose change that will support the extra 30 kuai a person. Finally, we agree and move through customs. Our bags go through an unmanned x-ray machine and we walk through an unmanned metal detector.

A man without a uniform, wearing an adidas sweat suit and a t-shirt, writes down our names, nationality, and passport number in a big paper book (check #3).  

At the next desk, a woman in a military uniform enters our departure slip information and flips through our visas, checks to make sure they’re not expired and that we can go to KGZ without a visa. She gives us our exit stamp (check #4).

We have to give our passports to the driver, and he takes them through another door. He will keep possession of our passports until he gives them to the guards at the Kyrgyz border, who will then give our passports back to us. We load the car up and I see on the car. It’s then that I realize this isn’t just some Joe Schmoe off the street, this is a dude that works for a private taxi company that takes foreigners across the border professionally. Like as his job. He probably has to give a commission to the taxi company and government, that’s why his rate is so high to take us a relatively short distance.

We start driving and the driver shows the guards at the exit gate our passports (check #5). We drive through a beautiful red desert, with snowy mountains in the background and pass a few villages with Chinese propaganda all over, with both pictures and Chinese characters and Kyrgyz in Arabic script painted on the walls surrounding each village.

Finally we get to the border, where three trucks are lined up at a closed gate with spikes on it. The border is closed for their lunch break. I change some yuan into KGZ som and buy some snacks and water. It’s windy and cold. Flo, Mag and I eat together, like a picnic on a bench. Then there is some terrible wind, almost a sand storm, so we go into a nearby restaurant and sit.

We decide then maybe it would be better to go straight to Osh tonight without stopping for the night. At this point, we are as spry as bunnies.

Flo is especially upbeat and energetic as well. “I just want to ride in a truck!” he says with a huge smile on his face.

Flo speaks Russian too, so he makes friends with the driver of the first truck in a long line of trucks that now stretches as far as the eye can see. More than 20 trucks are waiting for the border to re-open after lunch. We wait until 2:30 local time, and then the guards come out and take their posts. Our driver gives them our passports (check #6) and we give the driver our money. We grab our stuff. The driver says he told the guards our plan to hitchhike, and another taxi driver tells us they will only accept two people in a truck at a time. I get nervous, truly afraid that they aren’t going to let us. Mag is confident--there’s nothing they can do once we leave China!

The truck drivers have to stand next to their trucks with their hands up and against the side of the truck while the Chinese guards frisk them up and down, and other guards check their cargo.

They let Flo, Mag, and I walk through and we say goodbye to our driver and the guards give us our passports back. We stand next to the first truck and the Chinese guard even helps all three of us get into the truck.

Our driver gets in and the engine roars to life. We start driving. WE’RE FREE! I think we were all so sick of China at that point that we just wanted to leave it behind.

It’s a wonderful feeling being up in the truck, I feel powerful and big and unstoppable. We can see the whole landscape, and the engine roars with life. It’s like we’re the kings of the world. And no more China, no more Chinese, No more annoying hassels. Just KGZ ahead of us. It’s very liberating and exciting, I feel refreshed and energized, ready for a new beginning, a new country, a new journey and a new adventure.

Less than a minute later we’re stopped at the next checkpoint. It’s the last checkpoint before we leave China. We have to get out and show the Chinese guard our passport at a gate (check #7). But it’s the last check...on the Chinese side.

3 more KGZ checks, and wait for our original taxi driver but he says it could be a couple hours while his truck waits to be inspected, so we should try to hitchhike with someone else. So we wait and read, and we see a huge truck approaching. It’s a double tractor trailer, and knowing it’s going to be slow, we stop it anyway because we don’t know when the next truck will be that will be willing to take us. He says yes to taking us to Osh, and we happily climb aboard. The landscape is beautifully breathtaking: mountains, both snowy and green, and yurts and men riding horses and sheep and cows and horses grazing. We get out one more time for another KGZ check of our passports.

As we drive, we listen to music on my phone, and occasionally talk in Russian, translated through Flo, with our driver, who is Kyrgyz. He has a baseball cap pushed to the side, in an adidas sweatsuit and adidas shoes. He makes this trip twice a week, he says. He is 28 and has a wife that is 23, and he has 3 children, and he only does this for the money but has no idea what else he will do.

He shows us pictures of his wife and 3 kids on his phone, they are all adorable. He wants 8, he tells us. He beams with pride and happiness, a wide smile on his face while we look through the pictures.

He asks for a cigarette and looks so disappointed when Flo says they are Kitay (Chinese), so I give him a pack of the Marlboro Golds that I have in my bag, which I brought to give as gifts, and he’s pleased. Flo helps him open a window on the top of the truck and Flo helps him light his cigarette while he drives. They have a bro bonding moment over their Russian and cigarettes, puffing and blowing the smoke upwards.

They chat about random stuff and Flo translates for us occasionally. We stop right before sunset at a beautiful “photo” point, where you can see the road leading down into the valley below, and we stop for a bathroom break and the view is incredible, breathtaking. It’s freezing cold.

We get back in the truck and have some dinner, we share some of our naan but the driver refuses the rest.

It gets dark and I turn on my fast-paced music. Flo and Mag sleep. I sleep. We try to stay awake in solidarity with our driver, but I can’t. I wake up and he’s bent over the steering wheel, seemingly struggling to keep his head up.

About 9 hours later, we arrive in Osh and through our sleepiness we almost don’t realize where we are. It’s after midnight local time at this point. We get out of the truck, thanking our driver profusely for the free ride.

We negotiate for a 300 som taxi to take us into downtown Osh, but get lost trying to find our hostel, so we end up going to another guesthouse.

The bed is so comfortable. I fall asleep immediately.