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Review of the e-Book “Xinjiang: A Travelers’ Guide to Far West China”

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This article is a review of the travel guide “Xinjiang : A Traveler’s Guide to Far West China“, written by Josh Summer, the soul of Far West China, notoriously my favorite website of my favorite Chinese province: Xinjiang.

Here at SDC we rarely review travel guides. The reason is, for the most part we don’t like them. Today we make an exception because, in my opinion, Josh’s guide is… an exception.

Why? There are two reasons:

  • The first is that Xinjiang is one of the most difficult Chinese provinces to explore, especially if you don’t speak Mandarin: there are very few guides or web sites that cover the province (for some areas the only resource in English is Far West China, besides which there are only sites in Mandarin, almost all of which are terrible); tourism is, compared to other places in China, less developed, just like the infrastructure. This last point is the main problem when you consider that we’re talking about a province that alone covers a sixth of China’s surface area.
  • The second reason is that Josh, the guide’s author, lives in Xinjiang since 2006, has explored every corner of it, and most of all has an unbridled love for this region. This love shows in the effort he put into writing this guide and what he’s been putting on his website for years.

[Read more…]

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Day Trip to Turpan – in Xinjiang – on High Speed Rail

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day trip to turpan

This article was written by Josh Summers, the founder of FarWestChina.

I remember years ago taking a trip to Turpan, a quiet but once important stop on the ancient Silk Road. I woke up early in the morning to catch a bus from the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi where I spent over three hours sitting in a chair whose padding had long ago been worn down to nothing.

It’s funny to think about that now as I write this from the comfort of my first-class seat on Xinjiang’s new high speed train. The grueling three-hour bus ride is now reduced to less than an hour on the train, and the cost of my ticket was the same.

You see, here in Xinjiang, China’s largest administrative region by land area, the idea of a “day trip” is almost laughable. Unless you’re willing to fly everywhere you want to go, most travelers have to budget whole days for transit between different parts of Xinjiang.

Now that the new high-speed train has begun operational, however, a day trip to Turpan is not only possible, it’s actually quite enjoyable. [Read more…]