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GUANSU, CHINA - (June 2007)
Tues 5th - Fri 8th June - (Lanzhou) Today Hee and myself were to leave the Tibetan part of China and head into the Chinese desert. We left Xiahe around 7am and headed to Lanzhou were we arrived around mid morning.
There's not much to say about Lanzhou as we didn't stop very long. The town is on the edge of the desert and has quite a big Muslim population and as a consequence there seems to be lots of Muslim restaurants dotted around the bus station. The LP says that Lanzhou is the most
'polluted city in the world', although it didn't strike me as being particularly any more polluted than any other major city in the world - although I don't suppose you get major sand/ dust storms raging through the main streets knocking down umbrellas and street signs and reducing visibility to next to nothing in the middle of the afternoon in most cities of the world!
Our plan was to get in and out of Lanzhou as soon as possible. We arrived into the town's 'southern' bus station around mid morning (there is seemingly four different bus stations in
Lanzhou). The LP said that there was a bus leaving from the ‘Southern’ bus station to where we were heading, Dunhuang, at 6pm. This was going to be easy, or so we thought - arrive at the ‘Southern’ bus station from Xiaha, get our onward ticket, find internet café to spend the afternoon in, come back to the bus station in the evening and leave!
However, what followed was the start of a strange couple of days!
Once we had got off the Xiaha bus, Hee approached the ticket office only to be directed to another counter where he tried to speak to the lady. With the Chinese that Hee spoke and English we ‘thought’ we were being told that there was indeed a bus leaving for Dunhuang at 6pm but that we couldn't get a ticket for it! After a bit of a confusing conversation we were told to sit down and wait. After about an hour and several more visits to the counter, another lady approached us. With Hee's good, but not fluent, Chinese we worked out that we should come back at 3pm. However, at the start of the conversation the lady seemed to say
something about the ‘Eastern’ bus station, but then seemed to change her mind and confirm that we could get a ticket from this, the ‘Southern’ bus station, but only at 3pm!
So at 3pm we came back only be told that we still couldn't buy a ticket - for the 16 hour bus journey that was leaving in three hours! Again, after another conversation in which both parties couldn’t really understand each other, we were finally allowed to go to the 'proper' ticket office to get our tickets. Unfortunately we were to then find out that all the computers had gone down and they couldn't issue us with a ticket. After another 30 minutes the computers finally came on and we got our tickets!
Then rather oddly we were whisked off to a mini bus and driven through town to what turned out to be the 'Eastern' Bus Station where we showed our ticket to the driver and boarded the sleeper bus and grabbed our beds/ reclining seats.
However, unfortunately things were still not as straight forward as we would have hoped. Just before the bus was due to set off, a women official from the bus
station boarded the bus and tried to throw us off. The only reason that I can think off why she wanted to do this was because we hadn't bought our ticket at the 'Eastern' bus station, even though we had a valid ticket and had paid around $20US for it - quite a sizable amount in China.
She was quite insistent as well, grabbing me by the arm and trying to drag me off the bus. And hence started a very loud argument between her and the driver and his mate, (There is always a drivers 'mate' on buses in China who deals with the luggage and payment from any passengers that the bus picks up on the way).
I'm not sure whether it’s the tonal nature of the Chinese language but one thing I've noticed while travelling in 'Chinese' China, is that when the Chinese speak to each other they always seem to shout! Being in Tibetan areas for the last three weeks where everyone seems to be very mild mannered and never seems to raise their voice, this argument brought it all back. In fact during our 'stay' in the bus station waiting for the bus
to depart, everyone seemed to be shouting at each other and even a few minor fights involving a bit of scuffing took place!
Fortunately Hee and myself watched it all from the safety of the bus and left it to the driver to do "our shouting" for us. Fortunately, the driver won!!
The bus finally departed around 6pm with Hee and myself firmly ensconced in our seats. 20 minutes into the journey we were to find that there was indeed a bus for Dunhuang that left from the 'Southern' bus station at 6pm! However, it was just a normal bus that met our bus on the outskirts of Lanzhou and transferred its passengers onto our bus.
However, we had unwittingly ended up with the best deal as with two nearly full buses cramming into the one bus there were not enough seats for everybody and some unfortunate people had to undertake the majority of the 16 hour ‘over-night’ journey sitting in the isle!
After the ‘carry-on’ over getting tickets and actually getting on the bus, the rest of the journey was pretty uneventful with the journey consisting of going through mainly desert areas. We eventually arrived
Entrance to the Dunhaung Buddha caves
No photos of the caves themselves were allowedin Dunhuang around mid day and promptly found a dorm bed in the hotel recommended by LP.
- (Dunhuang) - Dunhuang (which seemed to me to be about the most prosperous city that I'd visited so far on this trip to China) is in the middle of the Gobi desert and was once on the Silk Road. The city is famous for the massive sand dunes that surround the town and for the nearby Mogao caves which have lots of very old Buddha statues carved out of the stone inside the caves and fresco's drawn inside them.
Unfortunately, in the case of the sand dunes, the Chinese have made a bit of an artificial tourist village around the highest of the dunes and fenced it off charging around $10US for people to go inside. Once inside, it sounded like a bit of a circus where you can go on camel treks, do sand surfing, and drive a sand buggie around.
Hee and myself didn't really want to go in for any of this, all we wanted to do was to climb up the dunes and admire the surrounding landscape. Fortunately, or unfortunately as was to be the case, on reading the LP it says that you can avoid all the circus and the entrance fee by walking for a bit around the perimeter fence and then just wandering into the surrounding dunes when the fence ended - something which we decided to do.
However, half way up the dunes we heard shouting from below. We looked and couldn't see anything so we kept on going. However, the shouting kept on coming. Shortly after we had reached the top, we stopped for a sit down and to admire the view and hopefully a magnificent sunset. Ten minutes later an old Chinese man dressed in a security guards uniform, looking half dead with the effort of climbing up the dune, arrived at the top and proceeded to start shouting at us in Chinese while pointing down to the bottom of the dunes. There was no point pretending we didn't understand him as it was quite obvious what he was saying. So we proceeded to follow him down to the bottom again. No UK style 'right to roam' regulations here!
At the bottom he then proceeded to point to a sign in Chinese (no English) that had the figure 200 Yuan (nearly $30US) next to it. I guessed almost straight away what the sign was implying but we pretended that we hadn't a clue what the guard was on about. (Unknown to me, Hee had seen the sign before we started climbing and as Hee can read Chinese, he knew fully what it said!)
After a 30 minute stand off, where the guard kept pointing to his walkie talkie and saying police - and we kept on saying we didn't understand - we gave in and gave him 100 Yuan between the two of us. At the start he wouldn't take the money and motioned for us to come into his little hut. But we kept insisting he take the money. After a bit, he took it and subsequently put it in his back pocket - No doubt his family had a nice meal in a good restaurant that night!
It all seemed to be a bit strange that the signs telling you that you would be fined for going into the dunes were only in Chinese? I'm sure someone from the Chinese tourist board or somewhere has read the section in the LP that says about avoiding the entrance fee and thought, ‘lets put signs up in Chinese which hardly any tourists can read and fine everyone 200 Yuan’!!
Another couple of slightly strange events that occurred over the next few days, which were, (i) going to the movies to see Spiderman 3 which was completely in Chinese, in a massive cinema, where only four people were watching; and (ii) the occupants of the room next door to us in the hotel playing strip poker, or the Chinese equivalent, with the door open. One evening every time I wandered in and out of our room to the shower/ toilet block, the women playing seemed to be in a slightly less dressed state than before. Although I'm not complaining, the men playing always seemed to keep there clothes on!
The day after arriving, we went out to the Mogao caves which the LP says are
“one of the greatest repositories of Buddhist art in the world”. Staggeringly, the entrance fee to visit the caves is 180 Yuan (approx $25US) which is the most expensive entrance fee for anything that I've come across in China.
The tens of caves which stretch for 1700m along a canyon were built over centuries during the Silk Road period with the first cave estimated to be from 366 AD. The statues and fresco's within the caves are indeed very impressive put unfortunately on each tour you can only see six caves (the caves which can be seen being alternated each day to preserve them) and photography being strictly forbidden. One of the caves that we were shown apparently contained the third largest Buddha image in the world (unfortunately now the second largest after the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddha's in Afghanistan).
In 1900, a Chinese monk at the cave complex discovered a hidden library filled with tens of thousands of immaculately preserved manuscripts and paintings dating as far back as 406 AD. These apparently included rare Central Asian languages, music scores, medical prescriptions, Confucian and Taoist classics, sacred Buddhist sutras, and the world’s oldest printed book.
Probably quite rightly, it was mentioned several times during our tour with a sense of bitterness that soon after its discovery in 1900, several European archaeologists and adventurers managed to haul off 20,000 of these priceless manuscripts smuggling them all the way to Europe. The largest collection apparently now being housed in the British Museum!
The next day, we paid a visit to the 'Western Thousand Buddha Caves' which were less impressive but which still contained some well preserved statues and frescos.
After an enjoyable several days in Dunhuang, it was time to catch the train to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province in China's northwest.
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Hee
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^^
With Hee's good, but not fluent Chinese..... hm..........Thank you Michael HAHAHAHA