Every tourist traveling in a poor country has his story of a bus ride. Here is ours.
Buying bus tickets requires a certain amount of determination, or, putting it bluntly, rudeness. We already had developed the technique of physically obstructing the ticket window by luggage and elbows in order to secure ourselves the attention of the cashier, who otherwise would serve all the Uighurs and never bother with us foreigners complaining. Intruders who still tried to get past us would be pushed away with a measured blow. All of this in a manner of business, without inner anger, just an angry face to convey the message. That way we proudly conquered our bus tickets.
Lonely Planet gives the travel time from Hotan to Yarkand as six hours. There were several buses on that route and we decided for the 6 o'clock bus counting to be in Yarkand by midnight. The bus that was pointed out to us was clearly of somewhat lower standard than the second hand Mercedes bus that had brought us Hotan. The luggage went on the roof, safely under a strong net that would make sure it could not fall off. The cabin was quite rusty, the seats worn out, little space for the knees. Seats are strictly numbered and we had ours in the rear bench. Jörg with his long legs luckily was seated towards the aisle. The bus was not quite full, people were reasonably friendly, to our left there was a drunk who tried to talk us into changing seats, but we told him "no" in all languages he might possibly understand. There was a feeling that it was better to keep the atmosphere calm. In the row in front of us there was a young couple with their cute little baby. We left a little late and started very slowly, just to stop after fifteen minutes for a major repair. After another half hour we started again and left Hotan.
The oasis road lead through the now familiar alleys of poplar trees, poor mud houses changing with fields of cotton, corn, and -- imagine -- rice, rice fields under water with the sand dunes starting just behind them. There is a lot of traffic on those roads, cars, motorcycles, donkey carts, bicycles, a permanent honking of the horn, overtaking. Of course, on the way the bus picks up more and more passengers. We had not really believed to remain as comfortable on our seats as it had been in the beginning. Picking up passengers is a time consuming procedure, since there are tough negotiations for the price with each single customer, usually coming to a successful conclusion, sometimes, however also ending with the passenger grabbing his luggage and getting off angrily. During a staggering stop and go the bus filled up with passengers, extra seats were put into the aisle, kids, of course, were put two on one seat and in the end everybody was squeezed into the little space that was left for him. That is to be expected; what was annoying was that the trip seemed incredibly slow. By the time we got out of the Hotan oasis, it was getting dark. Now our bus was all alone on the desert road. It did not have much of headlights, but that way one saw more of the rock and sands in moonlight. Now the cute baby started to scream, and the mother, with all the patience of mothers tried to calm her, but, of course, without success. I guess the baby was not the only one who felt like screaming. (Much later, the father could not stand it any more, yelled at the kid, shook it, and -- in spite of our disapproval -- it calmed down at last.)
No light, no traffic, only the desert and moonlight and that dark crammed bus -- it felt a like strange company of people traveling through a moonscape to a different world. Now through the noise of the engine and the ceaseless screaming of the baby we heard somewhere from the front rows a strong female voice singing. It sounded like traditional songs, and the performance was quite professional. Every song got a lot of applause, sometimes laughter. The desert, the noise, the moonlight, the songs, it went on for a long time.
Then a stop, and everybody jumped out, some went through the windows, and neatly around the bus a large circle was formed, women all to the left, men all to the right -- all passengers of the bus peacefully peeing under the desert moon.
Soon we got into another oasis. Now there were many time consuming police checkpoints, long waits and lengthy negotiations. We kept asking where we were and whether this was Yarkand, but it was always different places. Wherever we stopped, peasants and children gathered around the bus and tried to sell fruit, bread, and other little snacks, with rather little success. Around midnight, when we had expected to arrive, there was a long stop. Most people went to eat. We realized that there was no intention to keep Lonely Planet's schedule, that this was the overnight bus to Kashgar and nobody cared when it came through Yarkand, as long as it arrived in Kashgar in the morning.
Jörg is a very talented sleeper (only one of his many talents), so he had been dozing off all the time, but even I, no matter how uncomfortably we were seated, more and more escaped into a half conscious state. When the noise and shaking stops, one wakes up, and we always asked: is this Yarkand ? When it finally was Yarkand, it was 4 o'clock in the morning. We got our bags from the roof, there was a taxi there right away, we mumbled something of ``hotel'' -- and indeed, 4 o'clock in the morning, we found somebody to open the hotel, checked in, dropped on our beds and slept.