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Many have lost their lives attempting to cross it but those days are mostly in the past. The word Taklamakan translates as “what goes in does not come out”. My next stop was Ürümqi, an 18-hour train ride away along the northern edge of the Taklamakan desert. The antiques dealer was going back and forth across the border, selling wares the way they had for thousands of years He stared at me for a moment, and then his face broke into a grin and he bear-hugged me. When the bartering had finished, I tapped him on the shoulder. It dawned on me that he was still going back and forth across the border and selling wares in the same way they had been doing along the Silk Road for thousands of years. You could tell they knew each other well but they communicated only in hand gestures. Near the centre of town, I spotted the old man I had sat with in the minibus: he was selling antiques from his suitcase to a Uyghur shopkeeper.
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There are few better places to take in the grandeur of the Himalayan and Karakoram mountains.Ĭlockwise from top: a shopkeeper in Kashgar bazaar a barber giving a face massage at the bazaar a cook making hand-pulled noodles Restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and converted into a heritage hotel, the palace bears the influences – Tibetan, Kashmiri, Ladakhi, Balti, and Central Asian – of the regions it borders.
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Once I reached Pakistan’s mountainous north, I rested for a few days at the Khaplu Palace. Instead, I had to take a several thousand-mile detour via the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, and Dubai! I had hoped to cross the border and then travel a short distance to Pakistan, but my proposed trip was restricted on security grounds. I arranged a guide to take me to the top of Peak Khorog, from where I could see Afghanistan across the Panj River. Unlike the rockier Pamirs to the west, which burst out of the Earth’s surface in dark browns and deep ochres, the mountains here look soft and glow purple, pink and blue. The far east of Tajikistan is dry, dusty and lunar-like.
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The sense of space, under the huge dome of the sky, is profound Kyrgyzstan is a nation of vast and sweeping valleys. After dragging my bags for several miles and warding off an aggressive mountain dog, I hitched a ride with two German motorcyclists to reach the Tajik side. I didn’t know there was 12 miles of no man’s land between the borders, connected by a rocky mountain road that would rise to 4,200 metres.
THE ETERNAL FRONTIER ESSAY DRIVER
My driver took me to the military checkpoint and waved me off. This digitized frontier operates as a safety valve for the pressures brought to bear on American citizenry by the continued repercussions of the 2008 collapse.To reach Tajikistan, I took the Kyzyl-Art pass. Red Dead Redemption naturalizes and, therefore, depoliticizes the economic downturn. On the digital frontier, Red Dead Redemption resuscitates white, middle class, heteronormative identity in the form of those who own small ranching operations and homesteads, and through these representations, teaches its players that suffering, loss, and rapid technological change are simply part of life. As the reformed gunslinger/cowboy/outlaw John Marston in Red Dead Redemption (released by Rockstar games in 2010), players go west in a 3-D diegetic universe that furthers and, more importantly, rejuvenates the hierarchy of national identities, informed by racial, gendered, and economic status, that has comprised the cultural field of the United States in one form or another since the early twentieth century. This essay argues that since the 2008 economic collapse, the popularity of the rugged cowboy has significantly increased in American film, television, and of particular interest to this essay, video games.