The World's Best Xinjiang Diary Ever: Golden Week Travels 2

We has no set seats for this part of the journey, so we set up camp in the stairwell (it was a double-decker train). It was not the most comfortable journey I've ever made, that's for sure. Catherine and I ended up playing cards with a group of Uyghur men who taught us some Uyghur games (none of which I remember). In turn, we taught them Snap, which went down a storm. (On a side note, did you know that Americans apparently call Snap "Egyptian Ratscrew"? Weirdos.) They tried to play this mathematic puzzle called Umbesh (15, in Uyghur). We very quickly worked out that it was mathematically impossible, as did a Han guy next to me. He told the Uyghur guy so, and then it turned into a fairly passive-aggressive battle of the ethnicities. The Han guy was clearly right, but there wasn't a chance that the Uyghur was going to admit that. It got quite tense actually, until the Han guy gave up. I kinda wanted the Uyghur guy to win actually; though he was wrong, Catherine and I had had the good sense not to rub it in his face, but the Han guy had come over all smarmy and full of himself - it all seemed a bit like a microcosm of the way society here works.
The guys got off the train somewhere or other on the route, and then it suddenly became very sleepy and dull. Plus, I had no feeling in my bum any more. At 5am, after, like, NO sleep, we got off the train. We tried to walk over to a hotel but they said they had no rooms, so we went back to the train station and hailed a cab. We tried what seemed like millions of hotels but all of them refused to give us rooms, saying they were full up. Lies, all lies. It was either because it was 5am, or because we were foreigners and therefore they would have to go through the hassle of registering us with the police and so on. Finally, on the point of breakdown, we hailed another taxi and asked the driver to take us to ANY hotel that would accept us. He took us to a lovely little place... it was cheap as chips, being renovated during the night by some partying alcoholics, and everywhere you looked there were little cockcroaches. But they checked us in! So no complaints. Catherine was decidedly unimpressed by the bugs, so when she went to the toilet and I decided to check the beds for those lil' critters, we thought it best not to tell her I found one in her bed. I flicked it off though : D
The next morning we dragged ourselves out of bed to see Aksu. There is NOTHING to do in Aksu. I am not joking. Never go there. We went to an internet cafe but could find nothing of interest stated on the web, then we went for some yummy lunch - even finding an eaterie was nigh-on impossible - and asked the owner of the restaurant what we could do. He laughed and said, "nothing." The only thing he could think of was looking at the old-style houses along a certain bus route. Whilst not riveting, we had little else to do so we got on the bus and saw the houses. They were basically just run-down little mud huts that people were still living in, in the depths of poverty; while built in a traditional style, they were certainly not the kind of thing tourists go to see - it seemed somehow distasteful and rude to ogle the pitiful living conditions. We stayed on the bus, half-expecting to see something else of interest (though pretty sure we wouldn't) and reached the terminus, a grotty little township called Wenchu. We wandered the backstreets of this town, which was definitely Uyghur in origin, and had escaped the strong hand of Han influence. The people were extremely poor and the general mode of transport seemed to be donkey. I got the definite impression we weren't welcome there, flashing our digital cameras and poorly-hidden money belts. We got back on the bus to Aksu and after seeing the People's Square area had dinner in what was quite a nice restaurant. It had very colourful fishies in its fishtank. That is possibly the only positive thing I have to say about Aksu.