Many Rivers to Cross – Mysterious River

Okay, this is a bit of a cheat, because it’s a river you can’t visit for two reasons, but hey, I want to show off a little, because I have visited it. Or rather, I’ve visited where it isn’t!

There’s a place rather unappealingly called the Sinking-Uighur Autonomous Region, it’s an inland area of China where nobody much goes because it’s a very stony, infertile waste, really. And it’s here that the mysterious river appears – but only during the summer season. It traverses the desert for about three months before vanishing again. Getting there is doubly impossible because almost nobody can get a visa for this area of China and only researchers with impeccable credentials are allowed in. Desert plant specialists are sometimes allowed to make special tours, which is how I made my lifetime trip to the mysteriously emerging river.

The mysterious river begins as an underground stream that flows out of snow melt from the Kunlun Mountains. Several streams then thread through deep canyons and flow toward the Tarim Basin until they become a large river called the Hotan, which then disappears!

Satellite imaging has now revealed what happens to it. In these images, water areas are black, vegetation green, and snow and clouds, white. Brown areas correspond to bare land with no plants - such as deserts. Scientists have tracked this territory with the Midori satellite and discovered that Hotan river, which appears in the middle of the Taklamakan Desert in june, simply descends underground for the rest of the year but still reaches the Tarim River flowing through the northern part of the desert. What happens is that the snow on the Kunlun Mountains melts in the summer and the river’s increased water volume causes it to appear on the surface, actually appearing to advance day by day, at the speed of about two miles an hour, through the Taklamakan Desert. To find this river, you need a GPS system because the only way to navigate it is by satellite tracking and the nights here are bitterly cold, so make sure you have polar camping gear if you actually get a visa.

This river is not the only mysterious one, as the desert around Hotan is dotted with other green belts and forms part of a trade route that we once called the Silk Road.

Mysterious China photograph by pmorgan, used under a creative commons attribution licence

 

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