Kashgar, China

Crossing the Karakoram mountains into China, the Karakoram Highway is a major engineering achievement. In 1987, much of the journey from the Pakistan border to Kashgar, an oasis in the Takla Makan desert,  was over the dirt tracks, through rivers and over boulder strewn stretches of desert – often in sight of the highway construction project.

This was the start of a journey that stretched across China. My route took me from  by bus from Kashgar to Korla, a small industrial town, where I might have been the first foreogner to visit for a long time. I gathered a small crowd of two hundred people who followed my as I explored the town. They were very polite and almost silent. It was a very odd experiemce. Ducking into a cafe, I found a table and ordered a beer and a good meal.  Dunhuang was next