Kashgar

This was my fourth visit to China, but my first to the Western part of it. Kashgar is nothing like anywhere else that I have visited in the country with a real cultural mix of Urdu, Chinese and Moslem. In fact, it is predominantly Moslem over Buddhist. Street signs are in both Chinese and in an Arabic script and both languages are commonly used (although neither are understood by me!).
Wandering around the streets was fascinating with a range of scents from the street food stalls, many colours from the hat stalls. In common with previous visits to China, I noted that whilst the streets were fairly busy, when you stop to look around and listen, you notice that they are quite silent and everyone is just getting on with their own thing. It's a fairly untouristy city, although we did catch up with many westerners at the hotel, so it really did feel like we were on holiday.
We met a couple of tour groups that were staying at the hotel, who we joined for dinner a couple of times, exchanging stories and answering the usual questions of where we'd come from, if we'd really ridden all of the way from London... Surprisingly, over the couple of days that we were in China, we met a number of couples that had cycled around Asia or even all of the way from Europe!
During our stay in Kashgar, we were not allowed to use the motorbikes, but it was a welcome change to be tourists on foot, so we had a look around the Bazaars and visited the Sunday Livestock market, which was a real hustle and bustle of locals and animal trading. Great for some photo snapping!
...and then it was back to the hotel to prepare the bikes for the onward journey to Pakistan and the Karakoram Highway.