We returned to Urumqi from Yining on Tuesday on a daytime sit-up bus, thinking it would be faster and more comfortable. The bus was big, air-conditioned and spacious and the ticket seller said the journey would take nine hours. We left Yining at 1pm and the road took us past some interesting sights. About 70 km out of the city the road winds through a spectacular mountain pass. Equally spectacular is the road building project going on here, involving tunnels through mountains, tall bridges over floodplains and soaring overpasses spanning high ridges. We eventually came to sweeping plain country with the snow-covered Tian Shan mountain range an ever-present backdrop, and we stopped at a tiny Uighur settlement for lunch at around 3pm.
The journey would have been very pleasant were it not for the unrelenting awful movies played at full volume on the bus video system. The first one began a few minutes after we left Yining and there was no more silence until 11pm when the driver mercifully pulled the plug. Over these 10 hours we were subjected to continual films but there was little variety of concept – they all involved violence, fighting, screaming, guns firing incessantly and car chases with insanely dangerous driving, all delivered at ear-splitting volume. One of them was the full-length version of King Kong dubbed in Chinese! It was ghastly beyond description and it seemed never to end. By 11pm I was at my wits end and ready to scream too. You can only wonder at the sensitivity of the person who chose these movies for screening to a diverse audience on a public bus.
There was another puzzling aspect to this journey. After the mountain pass there is a four-lane freeway all the way to Urumqi. Why then did we spend so much time bouncing around on rough winding gravel roads with the freeway tantalizingly in sight but not often enough under our wheels? Was the driver avoiding freeway tolls, or was he trawling for additional passengers? This never really became clear. What did become clear was that we were still making our way to Urumqi at 1am!! Even the normally polite, long-suffering Chinese passengers began to grumble and make mildly disparaging remarks about the bus, wickedly drawing unfavourable comparisons with donkey carts. We finally arrived at Urumqi at 2am, 13 hours after leaving Yining and four hours late! Even the bus station was closed and locked up, so the driver simply stopped on the edge of the road and unloaded the luggage into the traffic on the edge of a large deep puddle. We hailed a taxi and had the driver take us to the Xinjin Hotel where we had stayed before leaving for Yining. But earlier that day the Olympic torch had come through Urumqi and many visitors were still in town and the hotel was booked out. So we had to haul our packs up onto our backs again and walk down Renmin Road until we found a hotel that had a spare room. This was at the Xinjiang Rong Du Hotel and they had just one room left. But that was all we needed and we grabbed it and slipped thankfully between the sheets just after 3am.
The following day we were back at the bus station boarding a bus to Turpan, 2.5 hours to the East. We had to endure again the loud movies involving kick boxing, swords, pikes and pole axes, but this journey was much shorter so our tolerance level was up to the task. Though I still would have liked my own pole axe to give the bus video system a right good tweaking.
