Kashgar Sunday Market

The main Sunday Market is back in the centre of town, and although probably the biggest market I have seen on my travels it was not excessively interesting since it sold similar things to everywhere else- just more of it. I was quite amazed by the extend of haggling required though. I bought a necklace for 12yuan (1.5 US$) which was originally priced at 100yuan- actually quite impressed with myself with that particular haggle!

We left Kashgar by bus on Tuesday with still no news of our beloved truck, Daphne. Her and Pete are still stuck at the border with no papers to let them through. We stayed the night in the boring town of AkSu. It's amazing the size of population in some of these irrelvant never-heard-of chinese cities.

We did have our best meal out yet in China and probably the most interesting of the whole trip last night. Eight of our group stumbled across a small restaurant, buzzing with locals. We were ushered into a small private room with a round table. In the centre they placed a bowl of two different soups, one quite plain, the other so spicy we were all sweating in minutes and the taste blew your head of (but in a good way- if that's possible). We were then brought various different plates of things to cook in the soup; bean sprouts, beef, tofu, noodles, spinach, prawns, ham, lettuce, seeweed...wait it get's better... tripe, fish heads, and chicken necks! (The chinese have an amazing tollerance for whacky foods.) I ate them all in complete ignorance. One of the passengers in our group is of Chinese origins and although she cant read Chinese, she can speak a little and more importantly knows quite a lot about the traditions and food delicacies, so afterwards, amusingly, she explained what we had all eaten.

Today we drove on to Kucha, yet another big city. We stopped at some caves with "a Thousand Budda Images" dating from 5th Century AD, but the paintings had not been well preserved.