Silk Road Day 3 - Jiayuguan and train to Dunhuang

We saw a few hours of scenery after we woke up on the train, before we arrived in Jiayuguan. As you can see its pretty bleak in Gansu. Dirt and power lines basically. It would be really hard to make a living here off the land. Also the dirt seems to have been dug up all over the place and then just left there. Next to the train line it makes sense because they used it to build the train line, but elsewhere its a bit weird. Actually a day or two later we went past a dug up looking field and our friends told us it was the local cemetary. There were no grave stones or markings at all, just mounds of dirt.


We arrived in Jiayuguan at about 11am, and first bought train tickets for later that day to go to Dunhuang. We met a nice chinese couple in the ticket office who spoke English and gave us some info on the train - supposed to take 3 hours to the Liuyuan station, then you get a car for 30 minutes to Dunhuang. It turned out to take a little longer than this.

Jiayuguan is sometimes known as the 'mouth of China'. Here they have the Jiayuguan Fort and the western most points of the Great Wall of China. This used to be the frontier of China, but it has since expanded.

We spent a while haggling with a taxi driver to take us to the Fort and to the Overhanging Wall and finally agreed on 60RMB, which was more than the Lonely Planets info - 50RMB. We had to do a 'walk away' to get 60. We went to the Overhanging Wall first (part of the great wall) and walked up to one of the sentry posts high up on a hill, which gave a stunning view of the surrounding Gobi desert. It was a pretty steep walk so we were fairly stuffed at the end of it. It was fairly touristy really, as you can see from the photos the wall has been rebuilt somewhat, it hasn't lasted this well. At the top in the dirt everyone has spelt out all sorts of messages with the stones, in every available spot. Most were in Chinese - names in lovehearts. Some were English and said 'peace' or similar. When you walk down you go a different way, so the whole thing is like a big tourist circuit. There were some big horse at the end that Jane posed on. I'm not sure what they were representing since the labels were in Chinese (story of my life at the moment). On the way down these Chinese guys wanted us to keep taking photos of them, and after about 5 photos we were friends and so took photos together. We said nihao and they said hello, and then we all said goodbye.

The driver then took us to the Fort. Check out this link for info on the Fort. We rode around here on a tandem bicycle which was quite fun. The most interesting part was the museum which showed a history of the great wall. The wall was actually made from all sorts of different materials including dirt, and wood, whatever they could find in the local area. Lots of interesting pictures but they were in Chinese, so not much good to us. We had a look around the fort and I took some random pictures but was a bit bored by this stage (gee Great Wall, etc, ho hum) and was talking to Jane about this weird Chinese film I saw on Star Chinese about this princess, daughter of an emperor, who was born with a condition that made her smell really bad all the time. All her suitors ran away or killed themselves rather than marry her. Then a poor peasant gardener cured it and they got married and lived happily ever after.

When we got out of teh Fort our taxi driver was gone, and we had to catch our train so we got another taxi driver to take us, felt kind of bad but really the drivers fault for taking a risk in doing other fares while he was waiting for us. We went to the train station and got onto the train. It turned out we had standing room only tickets because the train was booked out. We got on and found a spot to put our bags and stand but some of the locals made room for us to sit down which was really nice. Lots of people were bringing noodles on to the train that they had bought from stands on the platform so I decided to buy some before we left. I went to the door and the taxi driver happened to walk past! I started asking him where he went and he looked kind of sheepish. I gave him 50RMB since we paid for the other taxi to go to the train station and he abandoned us and he was quite upset about this since he wanted to stick to the original deal even though he didn't wait for us. But the guard slammed the door shut and we were on our way!

The guy at the ticket office told us the train was meant to take 3 hours but it ended up taking 6. When 4 hours had passed, I asked the guard what time we were going to arrive and she said 'ba dian' which means 8 oclock but I was so shocked I didn't understand until about ba dian when we still hadn't arrived. But we had fun on the train. We stopped at some station and I asked this guy we were sitting near where we were. He said 'bu zhidao' so I immediately looked in lonely planet to see where we were. But it wasn't in there, since 'bu zhidao' means 'don't know'. We stayed at bu zhidao for ages. Me and Jane bought some cold noodles with chicken and vinegar for 2RMB. This was expensive, a cheap snacky meal was 0.5 RMB (7c AUS). Then we were off again. We put our rubbish under the seat so we could throw it away later, and then the guard came along, picked it up and threw it out the window. That's what everyone seemed to do with their rubbish. We noticed some facilities near the train tracks that you could see on approach and then all of a sudden there were big mounds of dirt and forests (in the middle of the desert) between the train tracks and the facility. We had some long conversations with the passengers during which we established that we were from Australia and didn't really understand what they were saying. Then towards the end of the trip they became very insistent on communicating something to us. We thought they were asking us whether we liked the train music (which is usually Kenny G or similar) but no. We thought they wanted to listen to our ipod, but no. They wanted us to SING to the carriage. We firmly refused but they went ahead and got the whole carriage to stand around us at our end and then started clapping a beat for us. We had no idea what to sing. We had just been listening to Manic Monday by the Bangles on my ipod so we sang that. They loved it, even though we didn't know half the words. Then we sang I still call Australia home. Then they told us to sit down, which was a pity because I was getting into it by that stage.

We ran into the same chinese couple that we met in the Jiayuguan train station when we got off the train so we took a taxi to Dunhuang together. Dunhuang is 130km from the train station so it took a while. The couple were both nuclear chemists and the guy was posted out to some facility near Dunhuang. They commented on the stars and I noticed the clear sky, like Australia at night, no smog.

Silk Road Day 1 - Lanzhou

Its the Chinese National Holiday this week - we get Mon - Wednesday as public holiday and they move the following weekend to Thurs - Frid so you get the whole week. I've taken leave on Sat / Sun too so I'm on this trip for 9 days.
Here's a picture of my sister Jane eating fried eggs in soy sauce with chopsticks at the airport - they didn't give her a knife and fork.

The plane from Shanghai to Lanzhou was 3 hours. Lanzhou is in Gansu Province and has about 3,000,000 people. It's on the Yellow River and is wedged between two mountain ranges so the city has a strange shape and the airport is 75km out of town, the first place flat enough to land an airplane. The trip into town showed the arid nature of Gansu Province, one of China's poorest. I don't see how anyone could make a decent living from the land here, its so dry and difficult. Lanzhou itself is very industrial and has the reputation of being the most polluted city in the world. Its certainly fairly dismal although we found enough to do.







Still trying to work this out but below is a photo of a sculpture of the characters from the TV show 'Journey to the West' otherwise known as 'Monkey'!!!!! Who watched this as a kid? Yes, Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy and Tripitaka, and Horse of course. I think the journey they were on must have been via the Silk Road. They were on their way to India.

We managed to book overnight train tickets today as well, for tomorrow night to Jiayuguan. We bought hard sleeper tickets for 113RMB each, the trip is about 15 hours long. People told us the hard sleepers are fine.















Here are some pictures from a night market that we went to, mmm yummy. Chicken feet, lambs head and pigs trotter. Not much took my fancy.
















We also found a pottery bar, it sells tea and beer, and you can get on the pottery wheel for 20RMB / hour. It seemed to be mostly a local hangout.

At the hotel room that evening, we kept getting telephone calls from women who would either speak Chinese to us for a bit or just hang up. Jane had heard that prostitutes randomly ring hotel rooms in search of a nice man for the evening. We took the phone off the hook.

Silk Road Day 2 - Bing Ling Si

Today we got a car to take us on a tour of Bing Ling Si, a place a little way up from Lanzhou on the Yellow River. Here there are lots of Buddhist carvings in a cliff face by the river. It took us about 2 hours by car and then about 30 minutes by speed boat.

The carvings and statues are still quite well intact. They weren't destroyed by the Red Guards during the cultural revolution, or stolen by western explorers because of their inaccessibility.

It was quite an overcast day with a bit of rain but the scenery along the Yellow River was still stunning.
However, the land in Gansu Province is quite arid and rocky.

We weren't really meant to take too many close up photos at Bing Ling Si so not too much to show here.

We got back to Lanzhou and went to a hot pot place ( I think) for dinner - really delicious. They have a recessed stove in the middle of your table where they cook the meat and vegetables. Then you dip it in a sauce and eat it.

We caught the overnight train to Jiayuguan. We took the hard sleeper which was fine, they are actually not that hard (well no harder than normal Chinese beds which are harder than average). They have 3 levels of bunks and we were on the top so a bit of gymnastics. The toilets were pretty gross but manageable. You're not allowed to use them when the train is stopped so that gives you an idea of the plumbing. The train took about 15 hours and cost 113RMB each (AUS$20).