Blogs from Golmud, Qinghai, China, Asia

Hi All What a lovely place to stay for a day or two. A really relaxed feel to this town with quiet traffic, a first in our experience for a Chinese city, and pretty floral arrangements on the street corners. We stayed here a couple of nights just to break up the long journey to Xining. We visited the mosque, where were asked to sit in the shade and talk to the old men. We got as far as we could with our Chinese then a young man came and asked us the same questions again but in English. The mosque was very different to the ones we'd seen in Xinjiang. Gone is the heavy middle eastern feel, although there is a lot of arabic script on the walls, the old men asked if we could ... read more

Note: Our photo upload capability seems to be blocked here in Qinghai. We will post these later when we can make it happen. In China, drivers blow their horns. They blow them to warn pedestrians, to signal to other vehicles, to send a warning as they speed through a town, and to part livestock. It is also a habit perhaps concurrent with the excitement of the recent arrival of cars in the mainstream. In 2009 we observed a driver cruising down a six lane highway in the middle of nowhere blowing his horn vigorously at the empty road. It can be irksome but the system is quite useful at times. In many towns, a broken horn could be deadly; we recently sat eating breakfast at a gas station and watched countless scooters cutting straight across a ... read more