We’re back from Xinjiang; thanks for your patience. Tomorrow I’ll update this post with a few random thoughts about our trip. I didn’t take any good pictures, but here’s one shot from Heaven Lake.

Random Observations:

The flight time (air time) to Urumqi from Beijing was 3 hours 47 minutes (3 hours 22 minutes back) and the roundtrip tickets cost around US$300 a piece — Toddler T gets his own full-priced seat now.

We stayed at the Sheraton in downtown Urumqi which was pretty nice. It cost US$80 a night (corporate rate). It’s always key to ask for a non-smoking room when traveling in China. We had a car and driver for our various day trips out of Urumqi. That cost about US$80 a day.

The ideal way to see Xinjiang is to go out there for three weeks and rent a Toyota Land Cruiser and drive around on your own. With Toddler T and Nanny in tow, that’s not practical and the best thing to do is stay someplace comfortable and just do day trips.

We visited various lakes and scenic sites (including a wind farm) outside Urumqi, and enjoyed the clean air and sun. Urumqi feels like a very small city — a mere two million residents — coming from Beijing.

A pickpocket tried to steal my old camera in a market in Urumqi. He failed but smoothly walked on by as I struck at him — a pro. The Uighurs tend to be kind of silent and brooding and maybe even a little hostile. The Chinese communists have relocated millions of ethnic Han Chinese to Xinjiang, so the Turkic local people (Uighurs, Kazahks, etc.) are now outnumbered. If we want to “succeed” in Iraq we should take a cue from the Chinese and move a few million people from the American Midwest there to settle down. (Bad joke maybe?)

A word about market-dominant minorities: the reason why the Chinese dominate the economy in Southeast Asia, the Indians in East Africa, the Lebanese in West Africa, the Jews, well, everywhere, is that they are willing to do a deal. I found the local Xinjiang people very unwilling to cut a deal on anything. It’s like the market-dominant minorities have an intrinsic understanding of the time value of money and others don’t.

We bought several hand-woven wool rugs (dealing exclusively with Han Chinese). We don’t know anything about rug prices but ended up paying around US$1300 a piece for several 6′ x 9′ 720-line (518,400 knots per square meter or 334 KPSI) wool rugs. The price per square meter for 720-line wool rugs isn’t much different from hand-woven silk rugs, it seems. We were told no one weaves 720-line rugs anymore, and every one that is bought “new” is actually 20 years old. Any readers who know anything about hand-woven rugs, please leave a comment about this.

I fell down a storm drain in Urumqi. I got out of a taxi, put on my backpack, took Toddler T from the backseat and stepped back onto the sidewalk only to find no sidewalk there. I kind of slid, scraped, bumped down in, and as I fell I hoisted T up onto the ledge. Fortunately it wasn’t that deep a hole (maybe five feet), and although it was filled with fetid water neither of us was hurt. It could have been a disaster of course, and we were very lucky. Uncovered manholes and storm drains are a big problem in China. My classmate Rob from Hopkins-Nanjing fell into a manhole in Beijing, severed his urethra among other serious injuries, and needed to be evacuated to California for surgery.

I’ve eaten enough lamb to go several months without seeing it again.