Relaxing into my seat I get another of these rushes I've been having, a real buzz coursing through my body. Wow! Nice... No drugs either, just natural endorphines. Maybe it's the road, six months of it, they say it can do things to your head... and I think it's done something to mine too. I don't think I'm quite as rational as I once seem to have been... my priorities, they used to be so neatly arranged somewhere up in my cerebrum, have got a bit tangled recently. Oh well... that's the road for you. And this particular rush? Brought on by another road, a brand-new shiny black smooth cambered white-lines down the centre (not sure if that's strictly accurate, but hey...) road - oh how effortlessly we glide.
 
It's Kashghar, our latest destination. We get there and someone's left a big grey blanket where the sun ought to be. Or where I imagine the sun ought to be: I mean, up in the sky. I expect this sort of thing in London, where low grey cloud is so habitual you miss it when it's not there, where that fine warm drizzle is good weather  - it's what London is for, after all - ... But here? Closer inspection and it's not cloud but a dust storm blown in off the Gobi Desert.
 
The city's much bigger than I'd anticipated. The streets are wide and straight, crammed with shiny rectilinear office blocks; shops; department stores. This is China, no doubt about it, and it's... well... exhilarating I suppose. But where are the Uyghurs, the original Turkic locals? Up in the mountains? We cruise around a bit looking for our hotel, and gradually the Uyghurs become more numerous and Kashghar begins to take on the look of a Chinese city with a substantial immigrant population.

Our hotel is cheap. And luxurious, actually, in comparison with what we've become accustomed to. We head off into the night for another eagerly anticipated adventure in Chinese food. I wouldn't be the first person to rave about it: the sheer variety  - and, usually, quality -  has no equal, for me at least. Seemingly every part of every animal, plant or fungus has been exhaustively investigated over thousands of years of culinary alchemy and god knows what else. Unfortunately, though,  the western heathen's impulse to explore the inner sanctums of Chinese cuisine can be, sometimes, a bit dodgy... some would say even fraught with risk. Going commando once, picking some random squiggle on the menu, resulted in the cold-raw-spicy-pig-stomach-special; a few days later I had to move fast after unwittingly ordering the goldfish supreme. Fortunately the lucky bastard evaded capture long enough for me to realise the error and he was exchanged for sweet-n-sour pork. Good old sweet-n-sour pork. Pork balls in fact.

Our first full day in Kashghar was October 1st, Chinese National Day. They were celebrating 55 years of communism and the city was open for business big time, gorging itself on all those thousands of people visiting the city for the festivities. I don't get it. This is communist China, and it's a great communist holiday... and they're celebrating it as the most prodigious shopping spree of the year. It's the most rampant naked capitalism I've ever come across. So what do you call it? A celebration of capitalism in communism? of communism in capitalism?
Anyway, it's busy.

The shop signs are in Chinese with Uyghur in Arabic script underneath. Western products fill the shops. The noise... of touts and criers exhorting the masses through their magaphones to just step in to this or that shop, eatery, department store... firecrackers explode at every turn (funny, that firecracker smell, no?) wedding processions  - cars of course -  cruising down the streets in wierdly garishly ornamented vehicles complete with musicians crammed into the back of pick-up trucks blasting away on flutes and drums. We take an underpass to get across a hectic shopping street and underneath it, parallel to it, is another one, just as bad.

Maybe these communists could teach us a thing or two about capitalism...*

The city turns out to consist of ethnically distinct districts divided from one another in a way not immediately apparent to the casual visitor: you're walking down the street in 21st-century China, you hang a left, and bang! you're in ancient Turkestan with not a single Chinaman to be seen.
Because it's a funny thing but here in China I'm getting more of what I found in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, only more intense. The way people behave, the way they just are... the hustle and bustle and even muscle, not to mention the tussle... it's like a scene straight out of the ancient Middle East, but better because of the variety of racial types. This fabled, celebrated, illustrious Muslim oasis on the Silk Road is best known for its Sunday market. Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Uyghurs, Turkmens and Tajiks... they all descend on the city to sell what they have to sell and buy what they have to buy. It's a Central Asian culture riot.

The Chinese authorities have modernized the market building, numbered the aisles, stuck corrugated iron on the rooves, even hung up no-smoking signs. The stalls sell the usual usually useless  tourist trash. But the Kashghar market is much more than this inner core, and outside on the streets throngs of people swarm, jostle for space, selling whatever they can wherever they can.

Well, we're at the market, so we think we may as well try some Uyghur specialties. Meaning shashlyk. For a change we go for chicken rather than mutton and, using our travel-honed linguistic expertise we give them the internationally recognized symbol for chicken: flap your arms and dance around a bit. Seven sticks of chicken shashlyk we order, but half an hour later we're wondering where it is and whether we're ever going to get it. Then... then it comes (we're hungry, remember, so this is a moment of some importance). Only it isn't chicken. It's pigeon (was it the flapping we got wrong, we wonder, or the dance? Have to think about that...). Ditte and Yair have some wierd ideological objection to eating pigeon, but I'm liberated from all that stuff and eat all seven kashghari pigeons. I wished I'd known this was food when I was a student...

The Karakoram Highway links Kashghar to Pakistan over one of the most spectacular bits of landscape in the world. On my last trip the Pakistani side simply blew me away (emotionally, not literally)... and since we're in Kashghar I think why not join the dots? After a few hours crossing flat, featureless, lifeless, soulless desert, driving past forlorn and lonely sand dunes... we begin our ascent. Karakol Lake, high up, surrounded by 7000-meter mountain tops, is our first stop. We stay in a Kyrgyz yurt for the night and by noon the following day just have to leave. We didn't do anything wrong or anything, we didn't insult anyone... only, we had to leave and there's an odd reason, maybe difficult to understand... but the thing is it was just too beautiful, too damned beautiful. It began to freak me out, my head started to ache (and I don't think it was the altitude)... very odd. Unbelievably beautiful, as if... well, you're there, and you can see it's beautiful, how beautiful it is, but precisely because it is so beautiful you can't quite register it, you can't grasp it, and knowing it's real and yet not being able to internalize it, to take it in, that gets frustrating and in the end exasperating, and you realize all you can take away with you is a cliché. Luckily for you, you don't get anything like the same effect off a photo.

We move on to continue upwards to Tashkurgan, the home of China's 20,000-strong Tajik population. It's said that the Tajiks here are more in tune with their ancient culture than those across the border in Tajikistan, who lived through getting on for 70 years of Soviet ideology. Tajiks are Aryans: they're related to the Persians and are among the oldest ethnic groups of Central Asia.

So here we are in Tashkurgan, a clone of most other Chinese towns. A Chinese-populated main street and in the backstreets behind it the original inhabitants of the area. To be honest, I'm most interested in seeing the Tajik women, who wear beautifully colored headdresses and kiss on the lips in greeting. Unfortunately I never manage to catch this wonderful moment for you on film. The setting, however, is as beautiful as that just over the border in Pakistan  -  where it would be pretty silly to wait around trying to catch women kissing each other on the lips. Unless you like waiting around for extremely long periods in expectation of extremely rare events. Some people do... But this is a good place to stop, for a while at least.