Kites over Kashgar

I was sitting in a semi-public bath house in LiTang, China (follow link for my previous blog entry about LiTang) when the book first enthralled me. At a mere (ha!) 5,000 meters (16,500 around feet), despite it being the middle of summer, my childhood friend, Robin, and I needed to find some way to warm ourselves up. Hot springs sounded like the perfect solution. We hopped a taxi that took us the 10km outside the city through open skies and windswept fields sparsely populated with yak and yurt.

The hot springs turned out to be a newly developed bathing complex, complete with white tiles but with fairly large 'windows' (well, holes in the wall at least) that let the light shine in. The assistant opened a large valve and steaming, sulfur-laced water poured into the tub.

Desperate for warmth, I sank into the tub, and picked up the book Robin had brought from the US: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Poor Robin was reading a physiology text book if I'm not mistaken, and so it was with a little guilt that I lost myself in the story of Afghanistan for several hours before I noticed my raisin toes.

Such a vivid and enticing epic, my mind kept wandering to the closest I'd ever been to Afghanistan--Kashgar, XinJiang, China (follow link for blog entries from my time there, or see some of my photos here.).

Kashgar is a city of traders, and is considered to be the city the furthest west in China (and there is a big Mao statue to prove it, of course). It's roughly north of Delhi and lies next to China's borders with India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kyrgyzstan (and not too far from Kazakhstan, thank you Borat). It also used to be the capital of Chinese Turkmenistan (from before XinJiang was an actual part of China) and so I stayed in the former Russian Embassy which has since been turned into a fairly decrepit hotel. The city actually played a large role during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and as Hosseini was walking through Afghan history, I felt connected to it through my experiences in Kashgar.

What prompted this post, actually, was an IHT article (what else) entitled Gambling on China for an Afghan Epic. Turns out they are now filming the movie version of the book in Kashgar, which creates yet another link between Kashgar and the novel for me. I must admit that I'm really excited to see the movie now, not just because they've filmed it in Kashgar, but also because it is a good book AND they are actually filming it in appropriate languages, with for example, and Iranian-born actor who has even bothered to learn Afghan dialect. The waiting begins!!