Kashgar Shipton Arch
The natural rock arch is located about 80km from Kashgar , Xinjiang Province and is one of the tallest ones on earth.
The Uyghur name of this rock formation means simply ‘mountain with a hole in it’
The first Westerner to describe it was Eric Shipton, the last British consul-general in Kashgar, during his visit to the region in 1947. Successive expeditions attempted to find it without success until a team from National Geographic rediscovered the arch in 2000.
It takes half a day to visit this rock formation.
I rented a local driver through the very helpful tourist centre in Kashgar next to the Mosque on the Main Square in Old Town. The staff speaks good English, very very fond of Kashgar and they really don’t want you to leave!
I got a Tajik driver, he only spoke mandarin, but who cares? Even the first part of the trip that is about an hour drive goes through awesome landscape.
Once you passed the Irkeshtam Pass, a 20 minute drive is followed between the mountains.
The hike takes 45-minutes through the valley hemmed in on all sides by sheer cliffs.
Sometimes you need to scramble through narrow parts of the gorge
View through the arch - unfortunately I did not have super clear weather but it’s still rather awesome
How to get to Kashgar / Kashi Xinjiang Province, China
By Air
Kashgar Airport is located 15 minutes driving from old town. Most flights serve between Urumqi and Kashgar with flexible choices of schedule from morning to night. Domestic flights connect Kashgar to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou with a transit in Urumqi
By train
There are three daily trains which run between Urumqi and Kashgar offering hard seats, hard sleepers and soft sleepers - 18-25 hours. The train station is about 6 km-s from downtown