Golmud: City of Immigrants

China has been promoting a "Go West" campaign for a while now. The fierce competition of the wildly overpopulated east has been reason enough for families to make the drive westward to provinces like Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Tibet. Here are a few of the faces of Golmud, a dominantly Han Chinese city in the former Tibetan province of Amdo - now Qinghai.

These girls work at the Postal Savings Bank. They took me in a taxi to a larger branch office which dealt in Western Union money transfers.

Man of the bottle beverages.

Uighur boy roasting mutton.

Another hard luck story - one of the down and outs.

A Taste of 'Exotic' Uighur Food

I was never able to determine exactly what this stuff was. It seemed to be a bulwark of intestines stuffed with noodles, built upon a base of some lardish substance. All sorts of organs were soaking in juice within the intestinal wall.

After the stall operator has done his carving work, here is the final product. It was worth trying.

We encountered a pile of steaming guts on the sidewalk. It was reeking in the intense heat and swarming with flies. About two hours later the mound had disappeared, along with its owners.

Pigeon restaurants abound in Kashgar. The meat is rich and tender.

Unfortunately, I - somehow - didn't get a chance to try, or take any pictures of, Kashgar's goat head soup.