Nanshan @ Urümqi

With lakes, mountains, caves, and forests, Urumqi is famous for being surrounded by natural beauty in all directions. Awaking with the determination to explore this, I shrugged off my beer hangover from the night before and managed to get to the bus station. Due to some gap in the departure schedule, the ticket I ended up with wasn't to where I'd asked, but the girl at the counter looked pretty confident that I would be satisfied. An hour and a half later I got off at the last stop, where it was difficult to understand what the proper route was, there were just a couple of shacks around and two roads diverging from a fork. I picked a road, and after walking along it rather unconfidently for a bit, I was approached by a random Kazak guy.

Wandering away from the bus stop

Leaf Brewery @ Ürümqi

Near the end of the highspeed rail line on the westernmost side of Xinjiang, I found the last stop on my trip at the city of Urumqi, which China argues is the geographic center of all of Asia. Apon arrival I noticed that the tonal complexities of mandarin have eroded here, allowing me to relax my tongue while speaking with the locals. This is most likely due to the fact that this is a multi-language city, there is a 3.5 million population of Uyghur minorities here who speek the Turkic language of the same name.

On the Uyghur side of town