“Let’s see your Tiger-Crane style match my Eagle’s Claw!”

Ah, the immortal words of dueling Shaolin warriors. Though dialog like this is mainly the stuff of low-budget Hong Kong movies, there is in fact a place where such challenges are still uttered. Not to the death, of course, but between students at Shaolin Si, China’s most famous Kung Fu temple.

In these over-publicized times of China’s new railroad to Tibet, one might be better off avoiding the tourist circus than rnning away with it. Indeed, unless the reader has a certain fondness for overbooked hotels and intrusive, red hat-wearing tour groups, Lhasa is hardly the Tibetan delight that travel agencies continue to bill it as.

Perhaps the foremost reason why so few travelers make the journey to northwest China’s Xinjiang province is quite simply its vastness. Aside from being located on the exact opposite side of the country from Beijing, which itself is a long journey even by plane, the arid autonomous region is the largest territory in China, spanning over one-sixth of the second largest continent in the world. It’s also a long journey in terms of the cultural shift the traveler will experience especially when one spends a whole day in its street markets. And conversely, considering its proximity to central Asia, sharing borders with an astonishing eight other nations, one wouldn’t believe that Xinjiang is the People’s Republic’s least touristed province. But it is this solitude in fact that makes the provincial desert a distinct oasis in Asia.