Portrait of an LBX

A young Uighur boy helps out at the animal market in Hotan, Xinjiang.

Kashgar Old Town, Xinjiang

The universal language of flirting -- Kashgar Old Town, Xinjiang

A Uighur boy sells fried pockets full of lamb in Kashgar's quickly vanishing old town.

The man in this picture is a Uighur elder in the soon-to-be-demolished Old Town of Kashgar, a southern Silk Road city in Xinjiang. Less than a month after my girlfriend and I left Xinjiang, a truly horrendous scene has erupted there. I don't want to get into it on this site beyond saying that I would never have thought any of the people we met there -- Han, Uighur, Kazakh, Tajik, whoever -- capable of committing such acts of violence. But when you put anything under sufficient pressure, you never know exactly how it's going to explode. I had intended to post a lot more Xinjiang pictures here over the past few weeks, but I've been busy with my last month of work and getting the apartment packed up so I can move my life onto a bike for the next year or so. When we're finally on the road, Evan and I will undoubtedly meet many of China's 55 nationally recognized minorities. As we've seen in the past few days, tensions between some of those minority groups and the Han Chinese majority is often simmering just below the surface. Our goal will be to get beyond that in order understand those people for who they are beyond how they are defined by their relationships with other ethnic groups or the ruling government. I look forward to sharing those stories here.

An old muslim man leans against the steps of Id Kah mosque in Kashgar, Xinjiang. During prayer time, beggars will sit at the entrances to the mosque to receive alms, but I don't believe this man was one of them.