New York -> Beijing -> Xining -> Urumqi -> Kashgar -> Yengisar -> Turpan -> Urumqi -> Hong Kong -> Guangzhou

And there you were thinking that Changsha et al. had finally succumbed to the fate of so many ill-fated travel blogs. No, as the "et al." comes to represent an ever-deeper and more convoluted web of travel destinations, we soldier on.

Xining, located in Qinghai Province (Administrative Region #25) , has got to be one of the least-known cities ever chronicled on this blog, and with good reason. Like much of western China, it derives its appeal to travelers from its minority communities (Tibetans and Hui Muslims), but also like much of western China, the city has been so thoroughly inundated with Han Chinese that it might as well be Changsha.

Xinjiang (Administrative Region #26), however, is a different story. Although Urumqi, its capital, has undergone irreversible Sinification, the rest of the region remains thoroughly Uighur. Trying to get a decent lunch in Kashgar during Ramadan is like trying to find a clean bathroom anywhere west of Chengdu: it's simply not going to happen. Trying to communicate with locals using Chinese is also a losing battle - they speak Uighur, and are content to keep it that way. Turpan, the lowest and allegedly hottest place in China, is an unfortunate place to be a Muslim woman in August, when covering up every inch of skin is just as important as it is to a Harbin schoolgirl in the dead of January.

Here in Guangzhou, my home for the next year, it need only be said that the women (or, more accurately, the men) have no such scruples.