Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Start of the silk road

We've now made our way across the beginning of the silk road from Xian through to Lanzhou, Jiayuguan and now in Dunhuang.

Lanzhou was a let down in terms of the pollution, Chengdu was worse! We visited the end of the great wall in Jiayuguan and couldn't climb all the way to the tower because we're wimps ... so much for me being a mountain goat!

The trip here to Dunhuang from Jiayuguan was supposed to be 5-7 hours by bus. Instead, it turned out to be 10 grueling hours of monotonous desert landscape and stopping many times along the way to pick up hitchers. The bus also had to take a detour to bypass the police checkpoint since they had more passengers than seats. :D

Dunhuang so far has been wonderful though. Nice little oasis town in the middle of the desert where we can relax for a few days and checkout the caves and dunes.

2 Comments:

At 1:28 PM, Blogger Hank Liao said...

Wow, from your map it looks like you've covered the equivalent of all of Europe, like '99 style. And if you look at Ian's map, it looks like if you went in a straight line from Hong Kong you'd be at the black sea already! Good travels.

 
At 11:19 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Haha... can't make it to the top of the tower!!! I totally understand tho, not a fun thing to do when it's like 40 degrees outside. Thanks for the blog, it's like i am re-living my trip!
Sam

 

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