Daniel Dumbrill
We continued west from Hami to Barkol Lake, a hypersaline lake with no outlet - the water leaves only through evaporation. The town itself is a lovely little Kazakh-majority place of single-story bungalows and narrow alleyways. I really wish I’d taken more photos of it. A couple of funny things happened while we were there. First, two Uyghur girls on holiday from Ürümqi kept following my eldest son around. They finally worked up the courage to ask for a photo with him, but insisted his two younger brothers join in - probably so it looked a bit less conspicuous. Second, we found a nice little Kazakh diner. The owner looked distractingly similar to a certain overseas American-asset Uyghur who used to work at Guantanamo (most of you will know who I mean). She was a spitting image and it was genuinely hard not to stare. She was incredibly sweet though — she played with and looked after our daughter the whole time we were eating. Still felt completely bizarre. 😅
Daniel Dumbrill
By July 1st, we started making a lot of progress towards Xinjiang, stopping in random places that weren't on our itinerary. One of those places was in one of our last Inner Mongolia stops in a place called EjinaQi Strange Forest.
