Extend your summer while in Jimsar

Tent of a Kazakh family along the Jushi Pass. The Kazakhs have adopted motorcycles to transport supplies from the nearest town but still ride horses for their sheep herding. [Photo by Hai Peng/China.org.cn]

There are many different motivations for travelling. Haunted by the fear of losing life when winter brings visibly shorter daytime and starts limiting what I can do outdoors, I try to spend as much of my summer as possible in places where life on a daily basis is longer than what I can normally get.

Imagine a place where the sun rises at five or six in the morning and doesn't set until around ten at night. And imagine living in a place where the nearest landmark is not a 10-year-old skyscraper, but a temple or a fortress that dates back to a time when men met each other not in suit and tie but on horseback with a sword. And imagine life not being all about you, fatigued by the "you rushing to the office", "you fighting insomnia in your lonesome bed," and starts to be you fascinated by this heroic figure who walked on the exact same trail you are now on some 20 centuries earlier.

If you are enticed, you might agree with me that a plane ticket from sultry Beijing to a dry and cool prefecture near Urumqi is not only worthwhile, it actually extends your time in this world, literally, for the longer daytime and figuratively, with its historic relics and ruins which can bring back thousands of years of past life. The prefecture I am talking about is called Jimsar (jimusaer in pinyin), a little-known country expanse that is 200 kilometers away from the Urumqi International Airport. It is often ignored by tourists who are either carried away by nice pictures of the Heavenly Pond Lake on top of the Tianshan Mountain or by the much-storied southern oasis towns of Kashgar and Hotan. It even pales against its neighbor town of Turpan, because it is not hot enough or "sweet" enough to make people "die" for a taste of it. I stress the word "die" because one literally has to stay in a hard bed with fans kept on all day long in order to survive the 40 degree desert heat there.

But one can get very active in Jimsar. I certainly did. The 2,000 year old Jushi Pass (车师古道), which cuts through the eastern wing of the Tianshan Mountain, has an elevation that is enough to decrease the temperature by a good 6 to 12 degrees. The trail is legendary even for its appearance. It is hardly inhabited by any visible "technological" interventions such as cement or paved roads, or even shops selling bottled water. But there are human inhabitants there. Nomadic Kazaks burn horse dung and dried wood to keep their tents warm in the evening and cook lamb meat and make nang bread. They also supply the scanty adventure-seeking hikers like me with boiled horse milk and cow milk if one speaks to them in the few and simple Mandarin phrases they can understand.