Kashgar, China: A Vital Oasis on the Silk Road Both Then & Now

​After the 24 hours on the train that you read about in the previous post, we had crossed the Europe-Asia border and landed in Yekaterinburg, capital of the Urals. The Urals are the mountains that effectively make up the border between the continents, though it’s rough considering it’s all still Russia and kind of nebulous. But it counts! We’re officially in Asia! That means, we’ve crossed into Asia by air (when we flew to Thailand and Cambodia, which I promise I will finally write about after this trip…so…November?), by water (when we took a ferry in Istanbul to the Asian side of the city (which I promise I will finally write about after this trip and after I write about Thailand…so…December?), and now we’ve crossed into Asia by land. So fun! I was so ready to get off that train that my expectations for what kind of city to expect were super low, and I didn’t care. So I was surprised by how much I liked Yekaterinburg, at what a nice place it seemed like, with beautiful vistas and open spaces, good food, and a nice vibe. But, of course, it could just be because of the hotel.

​Because we had just gotten off a 24-hour train journey with questionable hygiene, and because after 24 hours in Yekaterinburg we would be getting on a THREE DAY train to Irkutsk that would change my preconceived notions of how disgusting I myself could be, we booked one night in a fancy hotel instead of a hostel for the first time this whole trip. Treat yo self! The Hotel Renomme was a very charming, clean, lovely little boutique hotel right outside a metro station and a mall. We checked in, apologizing for how disgusting we were in their clean, beautiful space – we were literally Bert’s chimney sweepers when they break into Mr. & Mrs. Banks’s house. Then we were shown to a room that actually made me cry. It was so cute. Nothing out of the ordinary, but mine eyes have seen some shit lately. It was a lovely room, with a big clean oh how clean bed, a little sitting area with adorable chairs and a cute table, a dresser, a closet with a safe and a minibar (I forgot such things could exist!), and a little balcony with French doors that opened onto the loudest street noise you could ever imagine (a bar below played loud music all day and night) but it was still a dream. It was about 10pm, and despite how badly we wanted to shower in that gorgeous, clean, oh so clean bathroom with its actual living breathing shower (no showers on the trains….hell there’s barely sink water) and oh I was gonna wash my haaaaair — that had to wait because it was super late and we were really hungry so had to find food first before things closed. 

​The mall looked promising, open still, so we walked around trying to find something and looked at a few menus before finding literally my new favorite restaurant, Schastye, a Georgian restaurant on the top floor with an incredibly vegan-friendly menu, you can’t even believe. The menu had so many vegetables and interesting preparations too that I wanted to cry for the second time in one hour. We ordered several dishes, including a Georgian specialty green called jonjoli that was a little pickly and sharp and was really good. The menu extolled its nutrient dense properties. Oh the menu itself was hysterical – fashioned like a huge magazine with ‘articles’ on the cover highlighting different Georgian dishes. So fun and so big. The table also had the super weird matrioshka (above) on it, which we were like what. 

​We also had an eggplant rollup dish, with the eggplant filled with a walnut paste. It was really good, and came sprinkled with pomegranate seeds which I love. I had a salad, because I needed fresh vegetables too, and even though it was mostly cucumbers and tomatoes and that’s the only veg we can consistently find and I’m pretty sick of them, I didn’t even care, it was good and fresh and in some kind of great walnut-based dressing I don’t even know. Then, after working out with the waiter which of the fun breads could be veganized, (he was WONDERFUL with the veganness) I got my favorite thing, this roti-like flatbread baked with spinach and other greens inside. It was soo goooood why am I writing this I want that now! 

​While Husband got a traditional dessert that he said was really good, I got a ginger lemonade over crushed ice that was perfectly gingery and burned my throat in that good gingery way. I really liked it even though I had forgotten that we’re not supposed to be drinking the water and the ice may have been made from tap water. It seemed like a nice enough restaurant that they wouldn’t voluntarily poison the customers though.

It was such a great dinner. I love this restaurant! Who has ever found great Georgian vegan food in a random mall? After dinner, we went to the big supermarket in the basement and stocked up on water for the night. And I saw this glorious vision:

After dinner, we dropped all our laundry at the front desk while begging them to do it by the next evening (they were so nice) and then took the longest showers in human history. My hair was so clean. I know this is boring and no one wants to hear about when we showered but we play by my rules here and also this hotel room and the bed and this shower and clean laundry were like the strongest argument I’ve ever known for that whole cleanliness is next to godliness business. 

​The next day, because we only had the one day in Ye old Katerinburg before catching the 3-day train that night, we booked a private tour guide. I knowww I know but we had things we wanted to see and that was the most effective way to do it. And it wasn’t super expensive either, and we both felt afterwards that it was 100% worth it. We booked through UralTerra and our guide Evgenia was excellent. She spoke the best English so far of anyone we’ve met, I think. She arrived with a car and driver and taught us so much about Yekaterinburg. We started by going to a central plaza that commemorates when the town was built, in 1723, and is right near the big city dam that was the most important thing leading to the city’s success. 

​When the dam was constructed, it could generate water-powered, um, power and so Yekaterinburg quickly became an industrial center, with factories all over its jawn. And its success and booming population generally lasted, with it now being one of the four biggest cities in Russia. 

​Next, we drove a few minutes to the Church on the Blood (if a Russian church isn’t about depositing a robe, it’s because it’s on blood), the site where the Romanovs were executed. We saw their tombs in St. Petersburg, and now we saw where they were betrayed and executed. Heart don’t fail me now am I right. They were being hidden on the site for a long time, before Sverdlov, whom the city was named after for a short time because of this, ordered their execution. Apparently, the whole family was taken down to the basement and told it was for their safety, and then lined up in their family order and told it was because they wanted to take a photograph, but then Sverdlov and his team just shot them all, including the children. People are monsters. It gets worse. The girls had jewelry lining their corsets so that if they ever got out they would be able to pawn it to survive, but it meant that the bullets didn’t penetrate and they didn’t die right away so the worthless monsters used bayonets. It’s such a grim history, and later that day we’d learn even more horrific details. What’s really strange, though, is that the entire family was canonized as saints, in an attempt for the country to maybe to try to seek forgiveness for this very dark history. So in this cathedral, where all this terrible evil happened, everyone is praying to the Romanov saints. It is very strange, to make them saints because they suffered a horrible death, and a whole lot stranger for people to base their entire religious fervor on praying to them for the same reason. It just felt very odd. 

​After visiting the cathedral (no pictures allowed inside), we drove back to Europe (hi Europe!) to Ganina Yama (not to be confused with Goitery Yana (or Baba Yagga)), an absolutely stunning monastery with the most peaceful atmosphere and the freshest air I’ve breathed in weeks (no smoking! actually taken seriously!). This land was like a small piece of heaven in a forest, with beautiful wooden cathedrals and smaller churches and lovely pathways and everything so in tune with nature. I felt so calmed and so relaxed, which is a very rare thing. 

​And then I was told why we were at this monastery, and I no longer felt so peaceful. That and because I had to wear a headscarf borrowed from the site’s bag of public I-doubt-ever-washed headscarves and I thought I was getting lice. Um, so this is where, after the Romanovs were executed at the place we just left, their bodies were carted for a mass burial in an abandoned mine shaft (which we saw, pictured below). They were cut up and burned in this mine:

​Some people were tried and executed for the deaths, but by the time it came to light that Sverdlov was the ringleader, politics had changed and instead of punishing him or ruining his name (he was already dead after all), they changed the name of Yekaterinburg to Sverdlovsk. Like…that’s not how you punish murderers, guys. Luckily the name is now back to being for Catherine and not some psycho child murderer. 

​It’s too bad this site is so beautiful, because knowing why it’s consecrated and revered is, again, very strange.

​Aside from all this horror, our guided tour of the area included what’s probably the highlight – the Asia-Europe border! So fun and silly!

​It was so cool to have one foot in Asia and one in Europe! Even if the border line isn’t actually exact, it counts.

The last stop on our tour, after we were briefly shown the new modern Boris Yeltsin Center and strongly urged to visit later for a much longer time (we would have if we had the time), was the Military Museum. It’s a small museum that doesn’t have much to it, but we wanted to go because it has a section about Gary Powers, the American pilot who was shot down in Yekaterinburg in 1960 — you know, the guy causing the trouble in “Bridge of Spies”! The guy traded for Mark Rylance, Greatest Actor of our Generation and Probably Most Others! So the movie/Mark/Hanks connection made me eager to see this. As it stands, it’s just a few pieces of his aircraft that they have displayed, plus some photos and a weird life-size mannequin of Gary in a uniform, sitting in a pilot’s seat. Errmkay! At first, the two people running the museum (no one else was there) told us that the Gary Powers stuff upstairs was ‘closed for renovation’, so we were like okay then peace out, that’s literally all we want in your museum, so then because we weren’t going to buy tickets they changed their minds and let us upstairs. So weird. Apparently most of the remnants of the crash are in Moscow, which we didn’t know, but I guess we saw enough. Made me want to watch a movie though. Three weeks without television so far! Ahh!

​After our tour, we wandered around the city, brought provisions for the 3-day train and bought food and chocolate. We went into this famous candy shop called Alyonka and found some accidentally vegan bars! Yum!

We went into another giant grocery store in another giant mall to get canned beans and produce for the train (they love their big malls and fancy grociers in Yekat!), and I know I already shared a picture of the Alpro nondairy milks from the first store, but I have to share this store’s stock too, BECAUSE WTF IS SOYA FOR PROFESSIONALS??? 

​If anyone knows what they mean by that, please tell me in the comments.

​We also stopped in the famous Uralskiye Pelmeni, a restaurant with a cafeteria style vibe (very common all over Russia) that has amazing pelmeni, or meat dumplings, for husband. Little did I know I’d find some of my favorite food of the whole trip – this stewed (or braised) cabbage dish. Oh my goodness, this was so simple and more delicious than it had any right to be (and incredibly cheap). We fought over the last bites when we should have just gotten more. SO GOOD. I also had a little raw cabbage salad that was merely perfunctory for its rawness and vegness but tasted better than I needed it to. 

So, we had a grand day in Yekaterinburg. Maybe I was just so happy to be clean, short though it lasted. Maybe it was because the hotel was beautiful and they did our laundry for super cheap to apologize for an unrelated mixup. But I think the city itself just exceeded my (admittedly basement-level) expectations. It’s cosmopolitan, it has beautiful open spaces and paths along the river. There are at least two restaurants I would be happy eating at 100 times each. It seems like a nice place to live, at least compared to a lot of what we’ve seen east of the Urals. I think we saw all the things we had to see, in just one day, but it wouldn’t be terrible to spend more time there.

      After spending a lot of time inland and in Bosnia & Herzegovina, I spent almost 5 days in Dubrovnik, the lovely crown jewel of the Adriatic. If coming from Mostar, like I was, you can take a pretty comfortable bus for a few hours and stop halfway through to see the sight above. How freaking beautiful is this. After the week in the mountains, it was nice to see the crystal blue water. 

     Dubrovnik is such an interesting little town, really unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It is entirely walled in (or at least the Old Town is, where most tourists will remain), a tiny fortress of a town surrounded by steep cliffs and the beautiful ocean. You’ll enter the Old Town by one of three gates, most likely Pile Gate, the main one from the major road outside (which leads up to the fancy Hilton). I’ve never been in such a densely touristed place. 

    
    Dubrovnik is a really easy destination for frightful travelers, because it is 100% for tourists. No locals live anywhere nearby – it is all the tourist trade. It’s pretty safe, and it’s incredibly easy and manageable. Kind of like an inoffensive Disney World but with history. 
     The main thing to do is mosey along the Stradun, the main boulevard through the Old Town, and wander all the little streets leading off of it. You can’t get lost; you’re walled in. The streets are filled with restaurants, cafes, shops, gelato purveyors, and, of course, cathedrals and museums. People-watching along the Stradun is first-rate, if you’re into that sort of thing.     

     One of the first things you’ll see upon walking through Pile Gate is the Franciscan Monastery Museum. It’s a pleasant little stop off the Stradun with charming cloisters, providing some calm from the throngs outside. It also houses one of the oldest pharmacies in Europe, and it’s still operating today. 
     My favorite activity in the Old Town was walking the city walls. For 50 kuna, you climb atop the city and stroll along the walls for a few hours, all around the city, and catch the most incredible views. I recommend going just before last call, around 6:30 pm, as it’s less crowded and you get great light as the sun sets.

     My other favorite activity? Kayaking! This might have been my favorite part of the whole trip because I love to be active and kick ass. And I kind of kicked ass. 
     The picture at left shows a little inlet that we pulled into about halfway through the ride, so we could swim. Also, the guide (and my boyfriend, because crazy) jumped off of that cliff. I know. It’s really high.     
     Outside Pile Gate, you’ll find tons of guys handing out fliers about kayaking trips from different companies. I’m pretty sure they are all generally interchangeable. I chose a late afternoon trip, hoping that the sun wouldn’t be as brutal. We kayaked about 3 hours, on a surprisingly far-reaching route circling Lokrum island. You kayak in 2-person boats, and most people had never kayaked before. (If you are alone, you’ll probably get paired with a guide, so that’s a plus.) It can be as easy or as strenuous as you want. I definitely recommend doing this if you can! It was pretty exhausting but so enjoyable. The company provided sandwiches (and packed fruit for me!), plenty of water, and had waterproof tubs for cameras and such. Once we were back on land, the guides opened a few bottles of wine for everyone to share while we chatted about our travels and backgrounds. We had such a great time! 

     Another fantastic thing to do? Climb Mount Srd! Ok, not with your feet, but in a cable car – even better! (I found one of the funniest ever admonitions against doing something in the Rick Steves guidebook. It says something like, “If you are in great shape, and it’s not too hot out, you might consider taking the cable car up and walking down the mountain.” Hahahaha. So yeah, don’t try to hike up it. Also, cable cars are fun!) The cable car entrance is a bit tricky to find, about a 10 minute walk outside Ploce Gate. The view from Mount Srd is so worth this ride.

     My last must-do thing to tell you about is Buza, a bar carved into the cliffs that doubled as a beach! 
     Dubrovnik doesn’t really have beaches (you go to the islands or to Montenegro for that). However, this little cliff bar-beach was even better – no sand, no hassle, just drinks and jumping into the water! So much fun! Also, the bar has one of the best drinks in the Balkans – Schweppe’s Bitter Lemon soda. I don’t usually like soda, but I loved this.
    You reach Buza from the corridors near Ploce Gate. It’s a little tricky to find. Ok, a lot tricky. I don’t remember how we finally found it, but it was worth the trouble! You just sit at a table, order a drink, walk a few feet towards the cliff edge, and jump!! Then you can climb back up to your seat, relax, enjoy your drink and the view, and then jump again! Lather rinse repeat. It’s really the coolest. There were people of all ages enjoying the spot, and there are many rocks of various heights to jump off of. I was a little skittish at first, and I didn’t go very high, but I still had lots of fun.

Speaking of Montenegro…
    Definitely go on a day trip from Dubrovnik to the Bay of Kotor! It’s beautiful, and it’s a really easy and fun side trip. There are plenty of tour companies around the Stradun, and most of them have affordable, small-group van tours to Montenegro. We drove on the famous road featured in “Casino Royale” to get to the Bay of Kotor, and our driver told us every Montenegrin hated the movie because shooting shut down this very important road for people who actually had to use it. Stupid Hollywood! The Bay of Kotor is so nice to drive around. Then we spent about an hour touring the nice little town of Kotor, during which I hit my head so badly that I thought I had internal bleeding, so that kind of colored my experience. I think it was the concierge at Hotel Vardar who helped me and got me medicine and ice, so shout out to her! Thanks for saving me! After Kotor,  we played on the (painfully pebbly!) beach of Budva. Such fun times! 

    And on the way back to Dubrovnik, we got to take a ferry! I don’t know why that’s so exciting!
    Our group included about 7 people, including two couples on their honeymoon. Everyone was pretty cool! We ate lunch together in Budva, where most restaurants have the ubiquitous ‘vegetarian platter’ of cooked nightshades. 

     Once back in Dubrovnik, we were lucky enough to catch an outdoor performance of the opera Cosi Fan Tutte, as part of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival. What a wonderful show! I love opera, and I love seeing it in other countries. This festival performance was lovely. The cast was really talented, and I thought it was a solid production, especially given the difficulties of performing an opera at night outside! If you are thinking of going to Dubrovnik during the summer, go during the festival!     
     If you’ve looked into a visit to Dubrovnik at all, you’ve probably learned that renting apartments, rather than booking hotel rooms, is the way to go. There’s a big fancy Hilton outside the main gate, but staying in the Old Town is so much more convenient and fun. We stayed in the lovely and well located Amoret Apartments, in every guide book, located near the Cathedral. It was a very nice, but I have reservations about recommending it, because the woman who runs it is kind of a lunatic. She was well aware of our expected arrival time, and we planned to meet then so we could get the keys from her, but still we had to wait nearly an hour in the hot sun, standing in front of the Cathedral with our luggage. At one point, I asked a waiter at a nearby restaurant if I could use the bathroom. I explained that we were to be staying in an apartment just above us, but the woman was keeping us waiting. He asked, “Oh, you mean Branka?” and I said, “Yes! That’s her. You know her?” He replied, “Unfortunately”, and pointed me to the bathroom. I mean, it was too late to do anything about it, but dayyyyum. We wasted a few more hours over the weekend waiting for her for various reasons, so if your time is precious to you, I recommend you go elsewhere.
    However, I do recommend that you stay somewhere in the Old Town, because it’s so convenient and because crazy random things happen at night, like this acrobatic troupe performing on our corner!

     And in the mornings, a market pops up near the Cathedral, with fresh produce, delicious candied nuts and other goodies, and lots of souvenirs. Those candied nuts were so good. Unfortunately, I ate all of mine way too quickly. (And they were supposed to be gifts, too.)
     As the city is so touristy, the food can be really overpriced for the quality you get. But I did eat at two commendable restaurants, Moskar Konoba and, of course, Nishta, the only vegetarian restaurant. 

     Most people focus an entire trip to the region on the Dalmatian coast, and with good reason. I’m so glad this trip allowed me to experience the rich history inland and in Bosnia and Montenegro, but Dubrovnik was a fantastic place to end. I’ll definitely need to return so I can see the islands, Split, and Plitvice lakes.