The struggle between the tourist and the tout is one of barely reconcilable differences.The tourist seeks a fair deal; the tout seeks to gouge, to exploit, to defraud. Touts do not respond to knightly courtesy; they are not gentlemen, so they cannot be treated in a gentlemanly fashion. When confronting touts it is necessary to tap those resources of harshness, even of savagery, that lie within every one of us. In his dealings with the tout, the tourist cannot be merciful. It is as well to bear these axioms in mind when visiting the oasis town of
Turpan (Tulufan) in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. To see the sights in the environs of the town - sights that are many kilometres away from each other and from the town - the tourist must contract with touts and consort with other tourists in the hiring of a minibus. The cost will vary according to the number of tourists, but one thing is certain: it will be poor value. There are unforeseen expenses. On one recent
Turpan day tour, the "guide" took the tourists, without asking them and despite the fact that most of them had just had their breakfast, to a restaurant (described as a "scheduled stop"). He ordered a slap-up meal for himself accompanied by two large bottles of beer. Perfectly unembarrassed, after eating his fill and expectorating loudly with satisfaction, he nonchalantly handed the tourists the bill. They were too polite to refuse to pay. This kind of thing is very much in vogue. It is also to be found in the monopoly two-day tours that tourists are compelled to pay for in Lhasa, capital of China's Tibet Autonomous Region. There, the official guides take tourists, without asking them, to certain trinket shops and carpet factories with which prior commercial arrangements have obviously been made. Again, often the tourists are too polite to demur. So in
Turpan the tourist must eschew politeness. He must be resolute. The climate may help harden him. "The winds are so hot they sear your lungs at every breath and the rays of the sun are death," exaggerates Peter Hopkirk in his fanciful book "Foreign Devils on the Silk Road." Thankfully, for the benefit of tourists, and at the wise instigation of the city authorities, many of the avenues of the town are covered with grape arbors. This is pleasant in summer, when the temperature is the highest in China. The town is in a depression 154 metres below sea level and is one of the lowest settlements in the world. Save the Donkey Gaochang, once an important centre, can be visited from Turpan. The tourist can easily get around the ruins by foot, but will be told by the touts that most tourist-worthy sites are "20 kilometres" from the entrance and that he must therefore travel by donkey-cart or taxi. They are in fact less than 1.5 kilometres from the entrance. The important thing to bear in mind here is that touts always lie. Admittedly, it is sometimes difficult to decide what is worse: a tout, or a fellow tourist. There is no setting the point of precedency between a louse and a flea, as Samuel Johnson pointed out. For example, on deciding to go by donkey-cart anyway, your hardened tourist was surprised at the reaction of a fellow tourist when the reinsman struck the donkey lightly with his riding whip to get the beast to move. "There's no need for that. Stop that immediately," spat out the tourist to the puzzled Uyghur man. In the West today, cruelty to animals, or imagined cruelty to animals, is judged a greater evil than dishonesty, unreliability, breaking one's word or cruelty to one's fellow man. Bombing Afghanistan with the deaths of 5,000 innocents is viewed as a humane act necessary for world peace, but striking a donkey is regarded as unpardonable cruelty. Funds for the Save the Whale campaign or the Save the Cockroach spiritual movement are virtually unlimited, but America can find no money to meet its obligations to the United Nations, and its aid-and-development budget is disgracefully small when set against its population. It is all part of the new Western morality of double standards. Kids these days The Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves, a repository of ancient art, lie about an hour's drive outside
Turpan in the Flaming Mountains. Most of the sculptures and frescoes have been stolen (by Western robber-archeologists in the early part of the last century) or destroyed. Your hardened tourist, making polite conversation, observed that the desecration may have been perpetrated during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) or that it may have been the work of earlier Islamic vandals. This off-hand remark, intended simply to make conversation, provoked a furious response. "You are so, so wrong. It was obviously just kids that did it," said the donkey-fancier. Kids. As if the Bezeklik caves were located in an American inner-city slum. And he added a piece of cod theology: "In any case, Buddhists don't believe in permanence. It's only us Westerners that believe in permanence." Bear in mind, then, that expressions of regret over the defilement of sacred images are likely to attract rebukes from certain "modern" and "spiritual" types of Westerner. These people have abandoned their own religion as so much bunk, but have enthusiastically embraced Buddhism, which they imperfectly understand. In particular, they are infatuated with the Lamaist strain. Upkeep needed The museum on Gaochang Lu, Turpan's main thoroughfare, is possibly the most dilapidated in China. It is badly in need of funds. But it contains a number of interesting preserved corpses from nearby Silk Road sites, including from the Astana Graves. Most of the priceless relics of the area were of course taken away by the Western archeologist-thieves.
Turpan is a good place to get your laundry done. Throughout the area you see many ventilated mud-brick drying huts, used to catch the necessary light and hot wind to shrivel grapes. It is worth buying a bottle of the locally made wine, at 3 yuan a bottle, and taking it on a visit to the karez wells. They use melted snow from the Tianshan Mountain Range that filters into underground channels. The pay-off The high point of a visit here is the Emin Minaret. If this were the only sight in Turpan, it would still be worth making the 3,000-kilometre journey from Shanghai. It more than whets the appetite for further explorations elsewhere in Central Asia, such as to Samarkand. The minaret, well over two hundred years old, is surrounded by grape fields. The mosque is a rectilinear building made of sand-colored brick. The interior is delightfully plain and harmonious, with varnished columns holding up the ceiling and several perfectly positioned skylights. There is grace and balance here. Travel tips The T52 leaves
Shanghai Station at 6:20pm and arrives at
Turpan Station a little under 49 hours later at 7:01pm. The fare for hard sleeper (lower berth) is 675 yuan ($80).
Turpan Station is in the townlet of Daheyan, 57 kilometres northwest of Turpan. The minibus fare from Daheyan to
Turpan is 5.40 yuan, the journey taking about an hour. There are regular minibuses; passengers from
Shanghai may wish to catch the one that leaves at 7:40pm. It is recommended to buy return or onward rail tickets at
Turpan Station booking office immediately on arrival, rather than waiting till Turpan, where buying a train ticket attracts a 50 yuan charge from the touts (there is no railway booking office in Turpan). Getting to Daheyan bus station from
Turpan Station takes approximately 10 minutes. On exiting the station, walk past the large numbers of taxi touts (who will want to charge up to 100 yuan for the drive to Turpan) and head north for a few hundred metres. At the intersection, turn right. The bus station is about 100 metres on the left hand side of the road. The bus ticket should be purchased at the bus station booking office before the minibus is boarded. On arrival at
Turpan bus station, walk in an easterly direction past the touts and across the square to Qingnian Zhonglu, where there are at least three hotels. Possibly the best of these is the
Turpan Guest House at the southern end, but they all offer similar low standards. Note that the Oasis Hotel (which has a picture of Jiang Zemin photographed in the lobby addressing a group of Uyghur and Han officials) now claims to have no dormitory - it charges 150 yuan per night for a double room. There is no airfield at Turpan.
