Xinjiang Yining Travel Notes - Qiongkushtai Chapter

Qiongkushitai Village is located in Kaladala Township, Tekes County. Kazakhs For the main.

The village is surrounded by mountains, and the houses are built along the water. Drinking water and domestic water for people and animals in the village come from the Kurdai River. The river valley is wide and the water flows all year round.

 

Qiongkush Terrace means big platform in Kazakh. Qiongkush Terrace is crisscrossed with ravines and has a masculine beauty in the grassland.

Under the blue sky and white clouds are the snow-capped mountains, under the snow-capped mountains and cedar forests is Qiongkush Terrace, and below Qiongkush Terrace is Kalajun.

It connects the upper and lower parts, reaching up to the Tianshan Mountains and down to the grasslands and river valleys. It always enjoys itself in streams, spruce forests and grasslands.

 

The village is not big, with a north-south ridge to the east and a small river to the west flowing into the Kurdai Gorge from south to north. Qiongkush Terrace is sandwiched in the middle, surrounded by mountains and rivers.

The houses in the village are all single-story wooden structures. Many B&Bs do not provide WiFi. You should ask whether there is hot water before checking in.

 

From the crossroads at the entrance of the village, you can go up the mountain to the east to watch the sunset and overlook the whole village; to the west it leads to Tekes County; to the north is the Kalajun hiking route; to the south you can go up the mountain to the entrance of the famous Wusun Ancient Road, where you can hike The whole process takes one week.

 

 

The Wusun Ancient Road leads to the Junggar Basin in the north and the Tarim Oasis in the south. It is the throat that connects the north and south of the Tianshan Mountains. Historically, many nomadic peoples have competed for this strategically important territory.

 

 

Two thousand years have passed, and the ancient Wusun Kingdom has long since disappeared into the clouds of history. Along the Tianshan Mountains, the mountains and rivers remain the same, but they are more vivid because of those legends. The Wusun Ancient Road, which runs between the north and south of the Tianshan Mountains, is a scenic road that has carried thousands of years of vicissitudes.

However, after an accident occurred during a marathon cross-country event in a certain city, the hiking route was urgently suspended.

 

 

Some of the tourists who come to Qiongkush Terrace come to ride horses. There are horse gangs at the entrance of the village. The price is uniform, 80 yuan per hour for a horse. You can choose the horse and groom you like. Many mainland tourists don't know how to ride horses when they arrive, so the grooms will ride on horses to take you (physical contact is indispensable), and some will walk in front of the horses and pull them to protect your safety.

If you like a groom...'s horse, you can add a WeChat account and contact him when you want to ride a horse. He will bring the horse to the door of the B&B (that is, the reservation system). Because they are on rotation, they may not be able to ride the horse the second time you go there. Both the groom and the groom are there.

 

 

And more tourists to Qiongkush Terrace come to take the hiking route, and they usually arrive in hiking groups of 10-30 people.

I went up the mountain with the two friends who chartered the car. They like horseback riding, and I like hiking, so we split up in two groups in the next few days. Of course when traveling with a threesome, you need to be prepared to be alone.

After arriving at Qiongkush Terrace, we first went to see the stream at the entrance of the village. In the flowing water, the fatigue of the 4-hour drive was wiped away.

 

After that, they contacted the groom to ride the horse, and I walked outside the village in the direction of Kalajun.

 

 

I sat in this river valley for more than half an hour, watching cattle and sheep gnawing grass on the hillside, and sheepdogs watching eagerly at my feet.

The look in his eyes was really fierce, and in the end I was scared away by it.

It wasn't until I left the territory of the cattle and sheep that the dog stopped clinging to my ankles.

 

I wanted to climb over the hillside, but several hiking groups coming from Kalajun told me to turn back, fearing that it would be dark and dangerous later.

 

I walked back to the village and played with a three or four year old girl. We competed in blowing dandelions.

Then I handed her back to her mother, climbed over a family's fence, and walked to the stream.

The village still maintains the original house construction mode of logging and building materials. This is a big tree that was cut down, perhaps it should have been a single-plank bridge.

 

I stayed for a long time by the river where I had to bend down because of the dense forest. It was very pleasant.

Suddenly a female voice called me from behind: "Are you looking at the water?" It was the mother of the little girl just now. She saw that I hadn't been out for a long time and was afraid that I would be in danger inside, so she came in to look for me.

Then she showed me the Ganoderma lucidum on the ground, the pine cones on the trees, and the wild onions and leeks.

She pulled me to step on the stones and jump over the rapid streams.

At six o'clock in the afternoon, several netizens took a bus from Tekes to Qiongkush Terrace. They said they had brought watermelon and invited us to eat it.

So I walked from the village entrance to the Hongqiao Inn where they were staying, and made an appointment to hike a short section of the Wusun Ancient Trail together tomorrow.

The canteen at the entrance of the village is a magical existence. I bought instant noodles, yogurt, eggs, ice cream, and fruits there, and I could also ask for directions. When I didn’t know how to walk back to where I lived, the canteen owner called me and asked the innkeeper to come out and pick me up. I. After standing at the door for twenty minutes, the guy from the canteen drove me back on his motorcycle.

When I woke up the next morning, I saw the innkeeper slaughtering a sheep. One sheep cost about 3,000 yuan. It was picked and slaughtered and cooked and eaten immediately. This is an original ecological pasture for grazing, which is different from the feed feeding in the breeding farm, ensuring the deliciousness of the mutton to the greatest extent.

The sheep is slaughtered by the second man, who is from the Hui ethnic group and lives in the middle of the mountain. He goes up the mountain and rents an inn in partnership with the Kazakhs. He only does business five months a year, from May to the National Day holiday. Because the road up the mountain is winding and covered with snow for a long period of the year, it is not safe to go up the mountain. The grassland only starts to get a little green in May, and only then do tourists and hiking groups begin to visit.

 

What impressed me deeply was what he said: "Don't think that we in Xinjiang are very different from the Han people."

He also worked in Beijing, Lhasa and other places, lived outside for a period of time, also bought Decathlon, and also liked to shoot Douyin.

At 12 o'clock at noon, he put down the knife in his hand (in Xinjiang, the sale of knives is strictly controlled. To purchase, you need to apply in advance. After passing, you need to verify your name in the store. Then the police will come to the door and weld the knife to the stove. You hold it up. (It couldn't move away from it for three steps) and told us that it would take us for nucleic acid testing.

 

If the shop owner and clerk do not have a 48-hour nucleic acid test record, the epidemic prevention office will quickly come to seal the hotel. If a tourist does not have a nucleic acid record within 72 hours, someone will also call to remind you to do it as soon as possible, and the trip may also be suspended when passing through the checkpoint on the road. When traveling in Xinjiang by bus, the drivers attach great importance to the nucleic acid test before getting on the bus. No one wants to waste time on the bus because of one or two people.

 

When registering my information, a staff member wearing protective clothing asked me, "Are you from the mainland? Do you think it's fun here?"

I replied sincerely: "The scenery is so beautiful, I really want to stay here for a while."

 

After finishing the nucleic acid test, we started hiking. We first went to the canteen to buy some food and brought it with us, which consumed a lot of energy along the way.

First walk through the Yinma River at the entrance of the village.

 

The dreamy thing about Wusun Ancient Road is that you can see different seasons at a glance. You can see the spring grass in the near distance, the green woods in the distance, and the snow-capped mountains at the end. The scenery is endless all the way.

The sunlight split vertically through the dense forest.

 

 

The weather was good when we first set off. There were some villagers' wooden houses on the first half of the Wusun Ancient Trail. Further on, there were only meadows, woods, streams and snow-capped mountains. After Da Shang and I walked for a while, we found that we couldn't contact another friend. There was no cell phone signal in the mountains.

It was supposed to be a trip for three people, but one person was missing.

 

When we reached the foot of the snow-capped mountains, we finally met the friend from Guangxi who claimed that he had “never tasted working in my life.”

He flew the drone to the snow-capped mountains for a while, waiting for the two of us to catch up.

"I've been waiting for you here for almost an hour." When hiking outdoors, you are afraid of meeting partners whose paces are too different, especially if you are not familiar with each other before. If someone is unwilling to wait, you will definitely disperse.

 

Suddenly dark clouds covered the sky and strong winds came up. It is not a trivial matter to encounter a storm in the mountains, so we quickly retreated.

The Guangxi eldest brother quickly disappeared again. Da Shang and I argued several times whether to take the horse path on the mountain or the grassland at the foot of the mountain. Sometimes we would listen to him, and sometimes we would listen to mine. There was no dispute. On some slippery dirt roads and rocks that needed to be jumped, he always looked back to see if I wanted to help.

In short, hiking alone in the mountains is very risky, so don’t even think about it.

 

The temperature in the mountains is low and the hail is falling, which is quite painful when it hits me.

We panicked and ran into cattle and sheep grazing in the woods several times.

My pants and shoes were soon soaked through. Da Shang and I told him not to run. It looked like it was passing rain and it soon started to fall ahead.

Then we found a piece of land and squatted down to wait for the rain. At that moment, what I was thinking in my mind was: "Where did that big brother go? Isn't it raining more and more as we run?"

 

 

It was just after five o'clock when we walked to the entrance of the village, which was the end of school time for the village kindergarten.

Some of the children were sitting on their father's motorcycle, some were being led by their mother, and there were three or five children playing while walking. But this little brother actually rode home on his own with a schoolbag on his back.

I decided to go to the kindergarten entrance at 9:30 the next morning to take pictures of the children riding horses to school. I also remembered that the next day was the weekend and the children would not go to school. What a pity! An opportunity for cultural exchange was missed.

 

The weather in the mountains is changeable. After it rains, the sun comes out at around 8pm.

I washed my pants that were stained with muddy water. Because I didn’t bring a change of clothes, I asked the shop owner to use a hair dryer to dry it. As soon as I plugged it in, the whole house tripped. After trying three times, the shop owner who was cooking had no choice but to say to me: " Just go to the entrance of the village and sit in the sun, it will be dry in a while.”

 

Kazakh man growing up on horseback

 

driving cattle

 

herding sheep

drive horses

There is only one bus every day from Qiongkushtai back to Tekes County. The whistle will be blown before leaving. Those in the village who want to go to the county seat should rush to get on the bus. Of courseIt will be safer to agree with the driver in advance.

If you don’t want to leave in the morning, ask the owner of the B&B to help you contact a carpool. If it’s a ride from villagers going down the mountain, it will cost about 30-50 yuan per person. If it’s a chartered car, it will cost 200 yuan per car.

If that doesn't work, walk to Kalajun. It takes 6 hours on foot and 3-4 hours on horseback. The scenery along the way is very good. Then you can take a bus from Kalajun back to the county seat. Anyway, I can go back.