Xinjiang: Yining (Yili)

From Urumqi we continued west to Yining on our way to Kazakhstan. The train was full as it's the start of the 5-day May 1st holiday. This time it was on the fast train, not smoky, for a change. In fact, there were constant announcements threatening that the train would come to a complete stop if cigarette smoke was detected. I was highly skeptical, but certainly kept it to myself.

Until the Qing Dynasty of China took control of Xinjiang in the middle of the 18th century, Yining area had been mostly claimed by nomadic people, from Indo-Iranian to Turkic and Mongol. Also, at that time Russia was also asserting its interest in the region. 

As a result, the artifacts around town are not particularly old, certainly not by Chinese standards. There was the old Uighur town with brightly painted houses, and the 1930s planned hexagonal community. Since it was the May Day holiday, there were a lot of Chinese tourists. It was rather festive.

We were not motivated to take a 120km ride to see the alpine Lake Sayram.

On the High Speed Train from Urumqi to Yining. Check out the colorful seat coverings and the spiffy airline-like attendant uniforms. Checkout the guy(below) with the megaphone, who drove me crazy with endless announcements: Safety slogans, "no smoking" threats, and travel tips says SL.




The landscape was all desert for the first 3 hours. Sun-Ling and I dozed off. Then, after passing through several long tunnels, we entered the Yili Valley with green fields, grazing animals, and several huge solar farms. SL continued to doze.






1600+ passengers disembarked at Yinning, the terminal station (1st below). The line at the taxi rank was very long so we walked out the main road where there were still a lot of people hailing or waiting for taxis. But in 5 minutes we were rolling towards the HULEJIA Hotel (2nd below) and its neo-1950's architectural style.




Just 3 minutes from the hotel we found a restaurant and had a nice meal of wonton dumplings with Spring greens inside, and a liang pi noodle variation, and soon after a granilla bubble tea and iced coffee at out fav drink shop Mixue Ice Cream and Tea.






After dinner we walked up to the Kazanqi Folk Tourism Area; that is, the Old Town. Many tour groups were walking around, some taking horse cart rides. The












Many of the buildings had Russian or Eastern European architectural influences.






The next we walked up the New Garden Hexagonal City, laid out in 1934 in a hexagonal plan. See the map (first below). Lots of tourists and more Russian and Eastern European influenced architecture. Not to mention the Eastern Orthodox Church (2nd below)










One of the highlights of the hexagonal city is the Accordion Museum. They also had a collection of pump harmoniums, brought overland from Europe I suspect.


In the evening we walked south through the Night Market (1st below), where I tried a cold yogurt drink, to the crowded Han (Chinese) Street Bazaar, a huge building with hundreds of food stalls, but nothing vegetarian worth trying.










Some final mosque shots.