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By Mackenzie Carpenter
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Western China

This is where the legendary Silk Road routes led into Central Asia, India and Persia. It's home to 200,000 Uighur people and has one of the world's largest bazaars, a meeting place for all of Xinjiang's Muslim minorities.

This region also is known for its ferocious geography — some of the highest mountains in the world and the Taklamakan Desert, which has gone by other names, roughly translated as, "where you go in but you don't come out." You can take a camel tour into the desert, but not too far, since its migrating sand dunes have been known to swallow whole busloads of people. Bates remembers one hot day where "one of my cameras did fry," she said.

If you go, she says, make it soon, before the indigenous peoples disappear into the maw of modernization. "We really wanted to see a place that is still unaffected by the West," she said, "but I'm not sure how long that will last."

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