On the road to nowhere in rural China

Each day was a mini-epic when MARIEKE HILHORST tackled a four-day bus trip through remote rural China.

After just two days in northwest China I've learned that "nowhere" has many middles. In the searing desert our driver hauls over at no place in particular for a comfort stop. Our guide gives a short spiel before everyone files off. It's all Chinese to me, but it sounds very much like "Welcome to the middle of Nowhere".

It's 3.30pm and our second stop of the day. The first was also in the middle of nowhere, as were yesterday's. We grow to like this place "Nowhere", grateful for the chance to stretch our limbs and sweat in the sun. The vast distances and rough roads of northwest China, conducive to slow travel, make each day's destination a mini epic and our driver is reluctant to stop.

The countryside is vast and, for a dry, arid plain, remarkably diverse.We are on the first leg of a four-day package bus tour, heading north from the city of Urumqi, capital of China's northwest province, Xinjiang. Our destination is the nature reserve of Kanas Hu, a lake surrounded by mountains and boreal conifer forest, lying close to the borders with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and southern Russia.

To get there and back in four days, our route runs 2000km counter-clockwise around the Gurbantunggut Desert in Junggar Basin. China's second-largest desert, Gurbantunggut's rainfall is as little as 100mm a year.

We are the only native English-speakers on the bus. Our guide, Mister Li, does a good line in "sorry", but that's where his English ends. And our Mandarin doesn't get much past "hello", "thank you" and "did you sleep well?" - none too useful when asking for the toilet or ordering noodles.

Day one turns out to be 15-and-a-half hours of desert travel, with sporadic air conditioning and a surreptitious battle over curtains with the people in front. Most Chinese buses have curtains, usually drawn, protecting passengers from the sun, prying eyes, the view.

We want our curtains open; they want the glare off the in-flight video screen with its kung fu movies and musical video of a popular female singer whose high-pitched nasal strains, like the local beef testicle dish, are an acquired taste.

Our driver saves Ms Nasal, played extra loud, for the humour-testing 1am shift. It's thanks to his penchant for hitting humps at high speed that we are jouncing along in the small hours, delayed by the evacuation of a woman to hospital with neck injuries. She failed to co-ordinate her descent with that of the airborne bus after a big hole in the road, and whacked her head on the ceiling.

I soon envy her early departure. After the second run-through of an especially dire movie I realise only five tapes are on board, and they play on loop. We get to know the characters intimately..

When we finally arrive in the town of Burqin, near the border with Kazakhstan, at 1.45am, everyone goes in search of an evening meal while we crawl off to our room and bed. And we're still last to the bus in the morning.

As we move towards Kanas Lake in the higher, cooler north, the landscape grows imperceptibly greener and the roads perceptibly worse. Winding through immense grasslands and hilly ranges, river flats alternate with precipitous drop-offs and we get our first glimpse of camels, yurts (the round felt tents of Mongols and Kazakhs) and China's peculiar floppy-bottomed sheep.

After a trifling seven hours on day two, we arrive. Kanas Lake lies at the northern part of the Altay Mountains, within a reserve noted for its Siberian forest and hint of snow leopard.

Summer lovers are cheated here - winter lasts seven months and spring kicks straight into autumn - but nature lovers will be happy.

Kanas and its environs offer permanent snow zones, alpine tundra zones, alpine meadow zones, sub-alpine meadow zones, low hilly zones, mountain marshlands and aquatic vegetation. Its hills are cloaked with virgin coniferous forest known as "taiga" - bounded by tundra to the north and steppe to the south.

The visitor information signs tell us among these trees are 99 kinds of fungi, though maybe fewer after our visit.

At each stop two fellow travellers, Fat Man One and Fat Man Two, fill bags to bulging for a slap-up feed of mushrooms back at the hotel.

The Chinese thrive on facts and figures, which they recite at random. Kanas Lake, I learn, is more than 24km long, an average of 1.9km wide and 46sq km in area. It stores about four billion cubic metres of water and is the deepest alpine freshwater lake in China.

In turn, we mortify them with ignorance about New Zealand's land area, the number of sheep, or our Olympic gold medal tally.

Kanas and its lake is off the beaten track in Xinjiang, a province that is already off China's beaten track. The area oozes remoteness. But the ubiquitous satellite dish has reached even here, atop a newly built and self-styled "groggery".

And authentic Swiss chalets are sprouting among the yurts and traditional wooden huts. What the customer wants the customer gets, as long as it's not hot running water.

Horse rides are compulsory, so we do. Well-used to the routine, Kazakh horses plod or trot to their own rhythm. On our way back we are privileged to a shyly delivered tour of a two-yurt family home and a bowl of homemade yoghurt.

The larger tent is the lounge-cum-kitchen. The smaller is the family of seven's sleeping room; the beds are carpets layered on the ground each night, and stacked up on the side by day. Grey-brown outside, the felt yurts are cosy and colourful inside, the walls covered in vibrant embroidered rugs made by the family women, and the occasional badger skin.

On day three we see the reason for our trip, Lake Kanas. To our consternation we are given two hours to explore its vast area. The driver is impatient to hit the road and is unswayable. His bus will leave at lunchtime, promptly. As we enjoy what we can of the lake and the view, we make sure we stick to the paved paths, exhorted by signs that read "Protect a leaf. Give your love to green lives", a more eloquent version of "Keep off the grass".

Back at the bus, our unexpectedly shortened exploration is made more annoying by yet another long argument - the horse wranglers are unhappy with yesterday's pay. Our "prompt" departure is delayed 90 minutes.

While the debate rages, the driver checks our fuel supply and the news is not good. An expensive can of fuel helps to appease the Kazakh horsemen, but it's a long way to the nearest bowser. When we slowly, inevitably roll to a stop, happily it is only a short pushbike ride of a petrol pump.

Re-fuelled, the bus journeys south along the western side of Gurbantunggut Desert, circling back to Urumqi, first through grassland steppes, then huge sand lands with immense mudstone pillars. Random camels appear as the bus flies by.

At some point of our final day, the beautiful landscape morphs into an ugly one. When not barren, flat and brown, broken by treeless mud hut settlements dusted black with coal dust, it is barren, flat and brown and dotted with hundreds of oil wells.

We drive for an age through a sea of drills, their eccentric drive shafts rising and falling as far as the hazy horizon on each side of the road. In its midst is the city of Karamay, meaning "black oil", China's petroleum capital.

But only we think the look is ugly. Our travelling companions are delighted and the driver is press-ganged into a photo stop. Oil fields indicate progress, development, wealth. And here in the the poor northwest, are some of China's most abundant fields, including this one in the Junggar Basin, with proven deposits of 320 million tonnes of crude oil and 52 billion cu m of gas.

These figures ring like music in the ears of a country whose growing appetite for oil is widening the gap between domestic oil production and demand. Along the roads leading to Urumqi, gas stations are sprouting to feed the rapidly increasing numbers of cars and trucks that toot through Xinjiang's towns and cities.

We reflect on the death of donkey-cart China as we drive back into Urumqi, and jostle through gridlocked traffic. Ah, for the serenity of Kanas.

CASE NOTES

When to go

Summers in the northwest run from May to August and can be fiercely hot. Turpan, a city 150m below sea level, has maximum temperatures of 47C - the washing is dry before it is hung out. Because winters are fiercely cold, guide books recommend spring (April) and autumn (September-November) as the best time to visit, though be prepared for rain.

How to get there

We flew to China via Hong Kong, on Cathay Pacific and Dragon Air. Cathay offers daily flights out of Auckland; Dragonair flies from Hong Kong to 27 destinations in China - we landed at Chengdu (home of panda bears) and flew from there to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.

Who can help

A Kiwi company, Silk Road Adventures New Zealand, organised our travel contact in Xinjiang. Check out its website - Silk Road.