Today was awesome for a few reasons: 1) It was not desert-like heat like we were all expecting, but overcast and breezy, which as you will find out, made for a spectacularly perfect day. 2) The tour guide was pretty much non-existent, left us to do everything by ourselves and gave us plenty of time. 3) This is what we did today:
Riding camels in the Gobi Desert.
I’ve been looking forward to sand dunes for pretty much the whole trip and they did not disappoint. Thankfully, the wind started picking up and we got the full “Lawrence of Arabia” experience, with huge gusts throwing sand into our faces while riding these huge behemoth creatures across vast expanses of sand. We wore orange shoe mitts that kept the sand out of the shoes (which were surprisingly very effective), and rode all the way to the top of the sand dunes, where we could then slide down on a toboggan or go ride a motorized dune buggy. I did both. Sliding down a sand dune perhaps sounds a LOT more exciting than it actually is. There’s a lot of friction on the sand, so at one point I had to paddle in the sand to actually make it move at all. But as disappointing as that was, the dune buggy was an extremely fun ride, with the wind and the sand blowing in your face as you race over sand hills and making sharp turns and almost falling off several times. And this is why the weather for today was perfect – if the sun was out full force and the wind was calm, it probably would have been as exciting as riding in the backseat of a car in 100 degree weather with the windows up and no air-conditioning. You really needed the cool breeze for the full effect.
Nothing but sand.
Camels lounging in the sand.
One tree, meaning oasis up ahead.
Now, despite this being probably the least cultural or educational experience that I’ve done on this whole trip, I actually reveled in the simplicity of being in a place with just one element – sand. There is literally nothing else around. I mean, even when you’re in the middle of the ocean, there’s other natural forms or life around. Even in most deserts, there are stones, rock formations, cacti. But here, only one thing existed naturally, and it didn’t matter that the wind was pushing it all over the place – it was all the same and it will probably never change. It will never freeze and it will never melt away. It probably looked the same 1000 years ago, and will look the same 1000 years from now. It was exhilarating to be a part of this completely unique landscape.
Earlier in the day, we visited the Mogao Caves, which is one of the many formations of the Thousand Buddha Caves, which is how the old Buddhist communities used to live back in the days of the silk road. They would carve out a huge set of dwellings in the side of a mountain, and decorate them with paintings and statues. Except when you get there, it’s nothing like you would think. Everything’s been renovated and reconstructed, and to be frank, it looks more like a hotel than it does an old Buddhist colony. And they won’t let you tour it by yourself, you have to go with a tour guide in a group of at least 20, plus they were super strict about not allowing you to take pictures or even bring a camera inside. So, they pretty much sucked every bit of fun out of this trip, and since the tour guide spoke really fast and used mostly transliterated Buddhist vocabulary, I was fighting the z’s for most of this tour.
One of the few photos I managed to sneak in before they started yelling at me and threatened to confiscate my camera. Really?
Thankfully, at the end, there was a little exhibition with English translations and I finally understood what the hell I was looking at. Apparently, this place had been ravaged by foreign archaeologists and scavengers for centuries, and so most of the Buddhist documents once housed here are now diasporically scattered around the world. But that’s about all I understood. There were scriptures in Tibetan, statues of Buddhas with multiple arms (which I always thought was Hinduism, apparently the Tibetan strand of Buddhism is some kind of amalgam of the two), bodhisattva statues (I only know Bodhisattva through the Steely Dan song), and the like. The coolest thing there was this massive 200ft high Buddha statue, where his toenails were the size of your head, nestled in one of the caves where you can’t see it until you get inside the cave, and then all of a sudden it just appears. It seems just about every ancient engineering marvel had something to do with religion. Too bad that isn’t the case today – it would be so cool! Why aren’t people building skyscraper sized Buddhas anymore? Imagine a huge Buddha in the New York skyline. Tell me that wouldn’t be awesome.
RIght now, we’re on the overnight train again, this time to the city of Urumqi, which has at least a little international notoriety to it. It’s known as the city furthest away from any large body of water in the world, which is a cool geographic fact but also probably means we won’t be seeing much seafood. (Score.) We’ll get there at around 7:30 in the morning, which means another night of sleep on this “soft” slab of wood. We’re going to Turpan tomorrow, which is actually a desert town known for their grapes and raisins, with a climate similar to Death Valley. Yesterday there were sandstorms there which caused tourists to be stranded there for the night, but I think that’s all done with and it’ll be nice and cool tomorrow. Or so I hope.
