A Silk Road Trip, or I Gobbed in the Gobi, China,1992

In August 1992, myself and my wife, Caroline, arranged a trip to post-Tiananmen China. It was in the days when the London China Travel office was on Cambridge Circus, opposite the Palace Theatre on Charing Cross Road. It took me at least twenty books, a late-night Japanese television series and several months to plan and arrange the trip from what was then our base in Balham, south London. In those days, you could arrange the visit via China Travel and then, as long as the itinerary was lodged in advance, you could travel absolutely independently. Everything was pre-paid, but on setting off, we had no tickets or confirmed reservations apart from our air tickets in and out of Beijing. As ever, I kept a journal of the trip, which ran to more than fifty pages. A few years later, I condensed the experience to two sides of A4, ignoring rules of grammar and syntax, and produced the following ramble, a perhaps poetic impression of nearly a month of travel.

Ex-London while the Sun dissected Michael Jackson's nose and praised Boardman's hooterless gold-medal bicycle. Air China to Beijing, where taxis cost more than Lonely Planet predicts. A Chinese character itinerary from one Tim Han of China Travel whilst fellow workers drool over televised lithe Afro-American sprinters at the Olympics. Then to the no-longer Forbidden City. Piles of local tourists to negotiate.

Four hours of Xinjiang Airlines to Urumqi. Signs in Chinese and Russian plus Uigur written in Arab script (a recent innovation). Land lines across Inner Mongolia. Why and how so straight? Urumqi multiple-peaked. Piles of coal, scruffy high rise, snow-capped Bogda Shen at street-end. Pavement fortune tellers, traders. Food stalls. Women washing sheeps' stomachs in a stream, tripe kebabs. Uigur town now Han Chinese, populated by Shanghai overspill, over 2000 miles from home'. The second long march.

Uigur breakfast. Hot sheep's milk, Chinese tea, flat tomato bread, sugared tomato and cucumber, pickled cabbage, thin congee, sheep's milk butter, two giant sugar lumps. Uigur market. Fruits amid a forest of hanging lamb. Chinese market. Live vegetables and meats. Tank over-spilling with energetic eels (unit price). Self-knotting spaghetti.

Woman losing her gold watch at an illegal 'find the lady'. Policeman looking on. Tears when the loss hits home. Renmin Park for noodles and rocket-fuel chili sauce. Bag slashers with finger-ring knives on a

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