After the stans I went back to Urumqi to meet my friend Reshalati, who was coming up from Chengdu to visit family. Waiting for her at the station, however, I got to be useful and help a lovely English stranger who needed
help finding lodging. Long story short,
her name was Sarah, she had lunch with Reshalati and me and we all decided to travel together up north to Kelamayi, the heart of XinJiang's oil country, where one of Reshalati's Uighur uncle is ... basically an oil tycoon. It's complicated. He's also a government official. Anyway, we went. It turned out, however, that due to XinJiang 's foreigner laws, not only were we not allowed to stay at his home, we weren't even allowed to set foot inside. This was embarrassing to him, as host, but apparently being a Party bigshot doesn't translate into getting to bend the rules, but actually needing to follow them really strictly. So that weekend we stayed in a hotel, and every day were treated out to breakfast, lunch and dinner by the Uncle's entourage. We never actually met Uncle the entire weekend. He was "in meetings" the whole time. We were, however,
driven all over the territory by a chauffeur and one of the Uncle's assistants. If you can imagine, we were driven to our hotel in a luxury sedan, but half an hour later we left in a luxury SUV, because they were worried the car was too small for us. It was posh and a half. Kelamayi is a big city, but before oil was discovered fifty years ago, it simply didn't exist. Seriously. The place has a populist oil legend you can read
here. We saw billions of dollars of water gushing in from Russia
here, and finally, ghost city:
here.
After the stans I went back to Urumqi to meet my friend Reshalati, who was coming up from Chengdu to visit family. Waiting for her at the station, however, I got to be useful and help a lovely English stranger who needed help finding lodging. Long story short, her name was Sarah, she had lunch with Reshalati and me and we all decided to travel together up north to Kelamayi, the heart of XinJiang's oil country, where one of Reshalati's Uighur uncle is ... basically an oil tycoon. It's complicated. He's also a government official. Anyway, we went. It turned out, however, that due to XinJiang 's foreigner laws, not only were we not allowed to stay at his home, we weren't even allowed to set foot inside. This was embarrassing to him, as host, but apparently being a Party bigshot doesn't translate into getting to bend the rules, but actually needing to follow them really strictly. So that weekend we stayed in a hotel, and every day were treated out to breakfast, lunch and dinner by the Uncle's entourage. We never actually met Uncle the entire weekend. He was "in meetings" the whole time. We were, however, 
driven all over the territory by a chauffeur and one of the Uncle's assistants. If you can imagine, we were driven to our hotel in a luxury sedan, but half an hour later we left in a luxury SUV, because they were worried the car was too small for us. It was posh and a half. Kelamayi is a big city, but before oil was discovered fifty years ago, it simply didn't exist. Seriously. The place has a populist oil legend you can read here. We saw billions of dollars of water gushing in from Russia here, and finally, ghost city: here.
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