Though the aircon on the bus to Dunhuang was non-existent, it was gratifying to see the landscape changing more to the type of desert I'm familiar with - flat expanses of sand and scrub like the Outback or Saudi. Dunhuang hotels that looked similar to the places we'd been staying in recently were all charging twice as much, and we ended up in a hotel that was a sensible price but rather stuffy due to the noisy but weedy portable A/C unit. There were several reasons why we'd come to Dunhuang, the most pressing being that we needed to extend our visas for the second time. Unfortunately we had no common language with the woman at the PSB but, using a phrasebook specialising in visa-related sentences, she informed us that we would have to go to
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