Xinjiang, Tian Shan; Trip to Snow Lotus Peak

[Tunafish]

I was excited, I finally knew the name of the place I was going... After a quick refuelling in Zhaosu I quickly continued, the limit I set for myself for this trip was 7 days and I was running out of time... My goal was to catch snow lotus peak on my camera and since it's in the clouds most of the time, I have to get there tonight so I can take photo's tomorrow morning... Zhaosu is a beautiful place, much more lush than yili, I bet it rains a lot more here, another difference is that Yili city sits at 600 m altitude whereas Zhaosu town sits at 1900 m...

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Now I was getting close, almost there I got stopped by another checkpoint... They seemed to overestimate my ability to understand their Chinese, I couldn't understand half of what they were telling me... But it was obvious they were quite baffled by this foreigner... They called someone, I heard something like "not possible", "on a motorcycle"... Then they told me to go down the road... to do something... So I went down the road a bit but couldn't see anything... I went back to the checkpoint, in Chinese the officer told me: "Down the road! 7 kilometers, you want to go to that place right?" Ehm... OK... So I just go there? Arriving at Xiata at about 20:30, I saw a rather large police station... Ok, so I guess what they meant was I should register at that police station... Sadly it looked closed, as far as I know foreigners need to register within 24 hours at the places they are visiting, so I supposed tomorrow should also be ok...

Going into the tourist area, this was clearly gearing up to become a major tourist attraction in Xinjiang... A huge gate was being build with an also huge eagle statue on top. Then after awhile it looked similar like places such as Kanas lake and Heavenly lake. A parking lot and little tour busses to carry tourists into the area... Not as pristine as what I was hoping for... I went inside.

After about an hour of riding I arrived at my final destination. What an amazing place... Squirrels and marmots running around everywhere, huge eagles and vultures in the sky, so many flowers and of course some of the highest mountains in the Tian shan mountain range...

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