Backpacks and Bra Straps (17 page)

Taking a Walk Down the Silk Road
22

“I
t sure is freakin’ hot out here,” I said. It was a desert-dry forty degrees Celsius (104°F), and even the slightest breeze made my skin crack and burned the hairs in my nostrils.

“Turpan is one of China’s natural furnaces. According to some, this is the hottest and driest area in the whole country,” Ammon explained. “It’s right at sea level, but only thirty-five kilometres (22 mi) outside of town is Aydingkol Lake, the third lowest geographical depression in the world. Only Lake Assal in Djibouti and the Dead Sea depression are lower.”

“Booty-what now? That cannot be a country,” Bree said.

“Djibouti. And yes, it is a country. In Africa. And that depression is only half a metre deeper. Do I have to tell you guys everything?” Ammon sighed.

“Ja Booty, ‘cause they’ve got big booties. Makes sense to me,” Bree demonstrated by dancing a little jig.

“Stop that,” Ammon protested.

“We went to a depression in California on one of our camping trips, remember?” Mom said, to distract Ammon from Bree’s openly acknowledged apparent retardation.

“Oh yeah. I remember that. It was really hot there, too,” I said, still vividly feeling the sunburn from when I was ten years old.

“Are you talking about the place where Mom superglued her eye shut?” Bree said.

“I only almost superglued it shut,” Mom said defensively.

Ammon shook his head. “No, not quite, but that was in Death Valley on the same trip.” Mom is known for always having Super Glue handy, and she had put her tiny bottle in the cup holder on the van’s dash, where she’d also been keeping her eye drops. As she’d leaned back to relieve her eyes, the thick goo hit her eyelashes, and she knew immediately something wasn’t right. Chucking the bottle, she instinctively used her thumb and pointer finger to hold her eye open, grabbed our only jug of drinking water, and poured it over her face. She was lucky it didn’t get in her eye or glue it completely shut, but she spent a good portion of that trip pulling her eyelashes out in clumps.

“I was really thirsty then, too,” Bree reminded her.

“You’re a bit of a whacko, you know,” Ammon told Mom, who simply rolled her brown eyes. “But anyway, Death Valley is the lowest area in North America. It gets a lot more visitors than Aydingkol Lake does, though, ‘cause it’s just too isolated.”
So naturally, that’s exactly where we’re headed,
I thought.

The area of Turpan has a rich history, but as Ammon said, not many tourists go there, so there are no regularly scheduled, local buses to the sites. We had to find our own way there, and we were still having problems withdrawing money from the ATMs. Luckily, we were able to exchange our spare cash and traveller’s cheques for an entire day’s excursion for only US$26.25 each; that fee included private transportation for the day, entry fees, and a guide.

“Ahhhh, the joys of having your own wheels and not being on a tour,” Ammon said, happy to have the freedom to do things exactly the way we wanted to – or should I say, the way he wanted to. We drove for over an hour through the infertile, windswept landscape to reach Aydingkol Lake. A few people lived in the small, derelict town beside the parched lake, digging random holes in the crusty ground to farm salt. The whole area looked like a greyish-brown field that had been ploughed ages ago and had then hardened in the baking sun.

“I can’t believe people actually live out here. I bet they’ve never seen anything green in their whole lives,” Mom said. “Oh, wait. I take it back. There’s a piece of broken bottle over there. But that’s the only green I’ve seen all day.”

When the car first stopped I’d held my breath, thinking we’d broken down again, but the driver let us know we’d reached our destination by pointing to the tall Chinese monument clearly labelled in red script ‘–154 metres’ (–505 ft). I was surprised that these deserted salt pans were even marked.

“Okay, we have a new contender for the End of the World title,” Ammon said excitedly as we stood at the edge of oblivion. “We’re way below sea level; this is the third-lowest spot on earth,” he announced, as if presenting himself with a trophy. Perhaps he felt that saying it aloud made it more real.

“We came all this way to stand on the floor of a dried up lake that’s more salt and mud than water?” I asked.

“This might just be the ugliest place on earth to live,” Mom said.

“I don’t think so, Mom. You’re forgetting about Irkeshtam,” I said.

“She’s got you there,” Bree agreed.

“For interest sake, Aydingkol means Moonlight Lake, or Moon Lake. Remember that
kol
means lake, just like Songkol.”

“It looks more like Mars to me. A really snowy Mars,” Bree said. There were crunchy layers around small pools of extremely salty mineral water. I hadn’t been too thrilled about our day trip when I got up that morning, as it sounded pretty gloomy. I was right about that, as it turned out; it appeared to be only a couple of rungs above Hell, and the locals looked to be in an even deeper depression than that. But I was happy to see how much joy Ammon got from it, because he was able to turn thoughts and imagination into physical experiences. I wasn’t quite sure what he was searching for on his explorations, but in the end, I was glad we’d seen it, too. As we turned to leave, I was sure I saw Bree pocketing some of the salt. I wondered what she intended to season with it.

“So dismal, but it’s totally a worthwhile excursion,” Ammon said as we climbed back into the car. This was only our first stop on a long day of sightseeing.

“It wasn’t particularly my cup of tea, though into every life, some salty tea must fall.” I shivered as I remembered the taste of the salty, milky tea we’d often had to drink in Mongolia.

“Gaochang, the ancient capital of the Uyghurs, is set on the northern edge of the inhospitable Taklamakan Desert,” Ammon explained during the hour-long drive to the ruins. “Initially built in the first century BC, the city submitted to Genghis Khan and his rapidly expanding Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century. It was once a busy trading centre and a major rest stop for merchant traders travelling the Silk Road.”

Other than a few domestic tourists in dress pants and Polo shirts, there was hardly a soul to be seen as we explored the remnants of Gaochang’s streets and buildings. Though eroded almost beyond recognition, it was staggering to think these sand castles had been standing for over two thousand years.

Built at the foot of Huoyanshan (’Flaming Mountains’), remnants of the crumbled city lay in the foreground. We stared at the scarlet backdrop as Ammon explained, “Uyghur legend has it that a child-eating dragon was slain by a hero here. The dragon’s blood turned the mountain red, and the eight pieces he was cut into became the eight valleys of the Flaming Mountains.”

“Yeah, that’s a lovely story, but they don’t really believe it, do they?” I asked.

“Who knows? I just thought you guys would like hearing it.”

“Well, why not?” Bree asked. “Maybe there were dragons thousands of years ago.”

“I sincerely doubt it,” Mom said. “We’d have fossil records if dragons had been anything more than folk tales.”

“There sure are lots of legends saying there were dragons, though, so it seems to me that they might really have existed,” Bree insisted with a frown.

Mom shrugged. “I think I’ll wait until they dig one up before I believe in dragons.” As Ammon went on to explain more of the region’s history, I couldn’t help imagining this ancient ruined town being blown to smithereens by an all-powerful dragon circling above. The atmosphere was already smouldering with heat waves radiating from the earth’s surface, so it was easy to envision.

Our next stop, the Astana Graves, was only six kilometres away (3.7 mi). While Ammon was delivering his mini-lecture about the burial site, Bree was off doing cartwheels and handstands. She continued her shenanigans even after she began jumping and waving her hands, crying “Ouch, ouch! Hot, hot, hot.” She really was just an incorrigible child in many ways – some of them endearing, some, not so much…

“Bree! Get down from there. What the hell?” Ammon shouted at her as she stretched out horizontally in a stone gateway.

“Oh, just leave her be,” Mom said.

“She doesn’t seem to have any interest at all in what we’re doing. We might as well send her home.”

“Oh, really, Ammon. We’re not going to send her home, so just leave her alone,” Mom repeated, defending her daughter’s naturally free spirit.

Banishing thoughts of Bree’s antics from his consciousness and turning to me, he continued, “You remember Astana? These are Astana graves, though I’m not sure they have anything to do with that city.

“Yeah, of course I remember it. It’s the capital of Kazakhstan. I love that name. I want to call my first daughter Astana Rose,” I said. We climbed the staircase of a stone observation tower jutting out of the crusty plain to get a bird’s-eye view of the ten-square-kilometre grave complex. The cemetery didn’t have the usual crosses and monuments you’d expect. Instead, it was covered with lumps of arid earth, so you’d never know there were over a thousand tombs. In the open courtyard below were twelve human-sized Chinese zodiac animal statues.

With not a single other human being around, I made sure to keep an eye on our driver, too. I knew how unlikely it would be for him to leave, but it would have been such a disaster if he did that I felt I had to make sure. Me and my worrying…

“Can I just say that this is a pretty boring place, Ammon?” Bree pointed out once she was finished running around.
She’s got a point there,
I thought.

“It is not boring,” Ammon said defensively, as if he couldn’t for a moment comprehend how anyone might possibly find it uninteresting.

“Yep, it is,” Bree nodded. This certainly wasn’t the scenic part of the trip – at least, I sure hoped it wasn’t.

“It’s totally not. And you know why? Because they have three graves open to the public, one of which has two mummies in it.”

“Really?” That got our attention – big time.

“Whatever. If you guys think it’s boring, then you should go back to the car while I go check them out.”

“Stop bullying them, Ammon,” Mom said as she walked away to find the mummies.

“Yeah, bum bum,” Bree and I smirked as we brushed past him to catch up with Mom, who’d found the entrance to the mummies’ burial chamber.

As we crept down the long, deep stairs into the tomb, I changed the subject. “So, are we going to go to Egypt, or what? Now that’s a place I’d be interested in seeing.”

“And we could ride camels at the pyramids, like they did in
The Mummy.
And man, wasn’t Anaksunamun wearing a wicked outfit?” Bree added. “Ooooh, and I remember doing a school project on the Nile River. It would be too cool to actually go there in real life.”

In the small, almost chilly room, bodies were lying on their backs in two glass boxes, their arms by their sides and their heads propped up on pillows. As twisted as this may sound, I was amazed that the mummies hadn’t ever been stolen, given that there was no one around to guard the tombs. The parched environment had kept them surprisingly well preserved. I was amazed to see that one of the two still had the cartilage of her nose, and her feet were still perfect, if a little on the dry side. All things considered, though, they didn’t really look a whole lot worse than my own parched feet lately.

“Eeew, that is so cool,” Bree said.

“Oh man, they give me the illy wills,” I said, looking into the glass box where one of the two mummies lay. This was a first for everyone but Mom, who’d seen a mummy in Toronto at the Royal Ontario Museum.

“Don’t you mean ‘the willies’?” Mom tried to correct me.

“No, I meant ‘illy wills’,” I said, my eyes still glued to the mummies.

“You know how she loves to make up her own vocabulary, Mom,” Ammon said.

I can’t believe I’m face to face with one of the long forgotten civilians who lived around here. Would she ever have guessed she would be here on display? What if I end up like her? How would I feel about that? It’d be kind of cool but kind of creepy, too, to be around to be examined by strangers thousands of years after I died.

Though my lifestyle in Canada was vastly different from that of the Chinese, I’d come to believe that we were all much more alike than we thought. Now, looking at this woman who’d lived some seventeen hundred years ago, there were few differences I could actually see. She was a human being, not some bizarre, ancient alien. She’d probably been a child-bearing woman who’d had to provide food and shelter for her family, who’d worried about their upbringing and their safety, who’d tried to make their lives better with songs and stories and lessons, perhaps, and so on. And here she was, one of the few who were left for us to observe. She’d been an actual person with a real life, and her challenges and worries so many centuries ago were probably much the same as mothers today experienced. I couldn’t stop staring at her feet, trying to imagine the earth between her toes and the road she’d walked. Was it much the same as it was now, dry and dusty and barren? Or had it once been green and full of life?