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To get from Dunhuang to Urumqi, in Xinjiang, we were taking a 14hr overnight bus which we, fairly, I think, expected to horrible. Our visit was also coinciding with a period of violence in Xinjiang, seemingly related to its being the anniversary of serious riots by the local Uighur minority in 2009, so we were worried that we, as tourists, might not be allowed into the area. Luckily, we were, although police came onto our bus to check the identity papers of all the passengers multiple times throughout the journey. We also had to leave the bus a number of times to pass through police check points, showing our passports to guards and putting our hand luggage through security scanners. It was obvious that no one was particularly interested in the three of us: as soon as they saw our British passports, or even as soon as they saw that we were white and foreign, guards would pass us by or wave us on.
All in all, the whole journey was pretty easy. The bus wasn't even half full, so we were able to bag the whole of the back row for ourselves and I even managed to find another two seats to move to when I wanted to sleep. We all watched 'The Parent Trap' together on my laptop, wrote our diaries and blogs, listened to music, slept... there were only a few hardships to endure.
First was the impossibility of using the toilet - at one point we did join the queue for some toilets, but these turned out to be just two trenches facing each other with rows of squatting women hanging over these and facing each other, which we just weren't desperate enough to endure.
Second was another passenger on our bus, who succumbed to motion sickness within the first half hour of the journey. She came lurching towards us down the aisle of the bus, a plastic bag of sick swinging from one hand, which I think you'll agree is not a great first impression. She then set up camp on the back seat beside us, where she lay retching and burping for the duration of the trip, only sitting up occasionally to vomit out of the bus window. We weren't delighted about this development, but it was okay. It was when our new friend began to stretch out and push her way onto our seats that we began to lose patience. I was sat on the outside of our three, and she hadn't been lain down long before she began to butt her head against my leg so I'd move it and give her more room. After I left to go sleep on two other seats, she stretched out across my seat and started the head butting against Hannah instead - despite already having three seats to herself. Hannah ended up lying down on the floor of the bus to sleep, so Vomitty McChunderpants stretched across Hannah's seat as well... and continued butting her head into Cat, who was by now squished up into the corner of the bus by herself. We were less than impressed. The cherry on top was when our new least favourite person's stop arrived. We wouldn't have noticed this, as we were all finally asleep, except she considerately shook Cat awake to offer her the full length of the back seat, an offer that might have been better appreciated had it not come in maybe the 11th hour of a 14 hour journey.
To summarise: we made it Urumqi and the journey wasn't as bad as it could have been. 6/10, I even enjoyed parts of it.
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