Still no internet. I was hoping there’d be internet at this hotel, but alas, it is nowhere to be found. I’m in Dunhuang, a tourist town right in the middle of the Gobi desert. It’s hot, dry, and the sun was still high in the sky when we arrived at 6:30pm. Today was an extremely tiring day, as we arrived at Jiayuguan (jia-yu-guan) at 7:30 in the morning after getting about 4 hours of sleep aboard the top bunk on a train. It’s really tiny and although not uncomfortable, it’s not the best sleeping conditions and the fact that the train stops every hour or so doesn’t help you get a real good night of sleep.
Today was the first day on our tour of the Northwest, starting with the westernmost point of the Great Wall at Jiayuguan Pass. It’s also the first time in over ten years I have been with a tour guide, so to be honest, I was a little apprehensive about the whole thing. Our tour guide met us at the train station, this little woman who couldn’t have been over 30, extremely excited and peppy, which was a nice surprise. And then I found out our group is only 6 people. So, this tour was already going a lot better than expected.
Jiayuguan is a huge city in area with a population of about 200,000 – which is a huge difference from the big cities that I’m used to. There aren’t any people in the streets in the middle of the day, almost no traffic, and about six shops total on any block. It felt like a ghost town compared to where we just were. After breakfast, we were taken to the city gate, the last gate at the western edge of the Great Wall, which acted as the Chinese border during the Ming dynasty. Even at 8:30am, the place was packed to the brim with tourists and tour groups, which I guess I shouldn’t be shocked about, but still, it felt way too crowded. The tour guide went through a well-practiced speech about what we were seeing, although she was speaking way too fast for me to understand, so I just nodded and caught what I could and took a lot of pictures. I’m by no means a Chinese history scholar, so everything was really just going over my head, but I did notice how well-fortified and well-engineered the Jiayuguan Pass was – to the point that they translate it as the “Impregnable Pass at the Great Wall”. Impregnable? Is that the appropriate word for a defense fortification?
The main gate at Jiayuguan Pass.
The two gate system means you will not pass.
Tourists are ABUNDANT.
There were a lot of little activities you could take part in as part of this tourist extravaganza, and like a good tourist, I did all of them. You could dress up like an imperial guard for 10RMB, which I promptly did and forced my tour group to wait up for. Then at the top of the wall you can do some archery and shoot arrows at a hay dummy for 1RMB per arrow, which I did, and I hit the center of the dummy on my first try. Finally, at the end of the tour you could go ride a horse around a circular track for 10RMB, and of course, why not, I rode a horse around a circular track. I mean, it’s fun and all, but this is kinda the reason I don’t like touristy areas – they lure you in with these fun activities, but why did you travel half way around the world to ride a stupid horse? I wanted to learn more about the history of the place, and very little about the tour is devoted to answering these questions. What we get instead are little anecdotal stories about how swallows couldn’t reenter the main gate after it was closed – proving how impregnable the gate was – or how they had one brick left after building the gate and left it on top of the final gate for good luck – stories that have nothing to do with why we were there. I really wish I could say I learned a lot from the visit, but the truth is that I didn’t.
However, after that, our tour got a lot better. We went to a very remote area of the wall where you could climb to literally the top of the mountain and look down at the entire valley where you could see where the Mongols would be coming from if they attacked. The tour guide left us alone to climb the wall, and we climbed a very tough half mile to the top – I was out of breath by the time I got up there – and the view was pretty awesome, with mountains on one side, and the valley with about a ten mile stretch of the wall visible on the other side. The other place we went to was a canyon with an old town on top of it where the generals used to all live, and a long suspension bridge the went over the entire 300ft gorge. We were allowed to explore all over this place, which was another just beautiful setting with all these buildings to walk around and information on all their war machines and what they did (in English, thankfully). Again, the tour guide left us alone – probably the reason I enjoyed this part of it so much.
The view from the bottom.
The view from the top.
The generals town on the canyon.
The canyon at Jiayuguan.
The scary suspension bridge.
We went into the town for a little lunch, and then left for the town of Dunhuang, which was a four hour bus ride on which I slept the entire way. We said goodbye to our Jiayuguan tour guide, and got picked up at the bus station by another tour guide, who was a little less peppy and a little older, but still very tour-guide like in the way that everything felt so formal. We were taken to our hotel, and then left alone again to explore the town by ourselves.
Now China, which is about as wide as the US, is on 1 time zone. Which means that while the sun sets at a reasonable time in the east (7:30 or so), the western part of the country sees the sun set much much later, at around 9:30. Which means that supermarkets and eateries are all open way later than normal, some as late as 2am. When we got to the food market at 8:30pm, there was barely anyone there. To eat dinner. At 8:30pm. People didn’t start arriving until at least 9 or 9:30, and then it got really rowdy. There was an opera show, people were in full force buying stuff from the blocks and blocks of street markets, and those eateries was cooking away like madmen. By the time we got done with dinner and then bought some stuff from the market, is was close to midnight. And we have to start the tour of Dunhuang tomorrow morning at 7:30am.
The main market street at Dunhuang - still light out at 9pm.
The night shopping kinda reels you in. We ended up buying quite a bit of stuff.
We found out from the tour guide that we’re going to explore the sand dunes tomorrow, and probably ride camels and go sand-sledding. And we’re also going to the Thousand Buddha Caves, which I’m pretty excited about too. Now if only the tour guide can leave us alone…
