My fascination with the Silk Road comes from a more
general fascination of places culturally, religiously, ethnically diverse. What’s best than the old Silk Road cities
to show the merging of Islam, Buddhism, East, West, Europe, Asia; breathtakingly beautiful Islamic architecture, Muslim hospitality,
ancient Buddhist art…
And now as I am living so dangerously
close to China (if not IN China) it was the turn of the Chinese portion of the Silk Roads, sometimes called the “Eastern
Silk Road”: the stretch in the Gansu province, from Lanzhou, the gateway city for the Gansu province, to Jiayuguan,
which, in the times of the Silk Road, was the Western-most outpost of the Chinese empire, and Dunhuang, an oasis town in the
Gobi desert and the home to the world famous Buddhist caves in Mogao Grottos.
In fact, the visit to Mogao caves was
accidental. While planning the trip, I found out that distances in the Eastern
Silk Road are huge, and the plan to travel from Xian - which is more easily accessible from Hong
Kong than Lanzhou - to Jiayuguan, several thousand kilometers
up north-west, over a long Easter weekend could only materialize if I fly. The catch is, unless you are very well familiar
with the Chinese airlines and even more importantly speak Chinese, it is almost impossible to get any information about available
flights and operational airports outside Beijing and Shanghai or other large cities in the wealthy Eastern and Southern parts
of China. Gansu definitely cannot be called wealthy.
But, what friends and internet are
for – with the help of my two dear Chinese girl-friends, one in Shanghai, one in Hong Kong, and an ever so helpful Lonely
Planet Thorn Tree, I found out that Jiayuguan airport is closed but Dunhuang airport is open. I could drive between these
two cities in six hours (private vehicle) or up to ten hours (public bus), and there are flights from Dunhuang to Lanzhou – bingo!
And so, after several flight cancellations
and changes by China Eastern (a fun airline – they cancel flights entirely at their whim and promise to refund you within
“three to six months’ of cancellation) the trip was finally taking shape as follows:
Wednesday evening – fly Hong Kong to Xian (China Eastern), Xian overnight
Thursday afternoon – fly Xian-Lanzhou
(Hainan Airlines)
Overnight Thursday-Friday – on
train to Jiayuguan
Friday – Jiayuguan; drive to
Dunhuang
Saturday – a full day in Dunhuang
(and the only day that I do not have to change cities)
Sunday – fly Dunhuang to Lanzhou (China Eastern) then to Xian (Hainan Airlines)
Monday – fly back Xian to Hong Kong (China Eastern).
From the experience of China Eastern,
up to the last day of the trip I was not sure how my itinerary would eventually shape up… Plan B (if the flight from
Dunhuang gets cancelled) was to take train to Jiayuguan, then come back to Lanzhou and explore
areas around Lanzhou (Linxia, called a little Mekka of China,
and Xiahe, with its large Tibetan monastery).
One of my biggest concerns, however,
was not potential flight cancellation but my inability to book train ticket Lanzhou-Jiayuguan from anywhere outside Lanzhou. In China,
generally, one can only buy train ticket at the station at which one boards the train. I would only arrive in Lanzhou at seven o’clock in the evening, and would need to secure a place on the overnight
train to Jiayuguan for the same day…
Xian
I landed in Xian late in the evening.
I chose to stay at a Xian Hostel, quite famous budget and foreign-tourist friendly place in Xian . Unlike a typical Chinese
hotel which are all character-less purpose built hotel buildings, that hostel is located in the old Chinese building just
inside the South Gate of the City Wall and was advertised in the LP as possibly the friendliest hostel in China. I booked
an en-suite with A/C for RMB 160. The room was at the second floor and had a tiny window overlooking the courtyard.
Can’t say anything negative or
positive about the hostel as I only stayed one night there. The ‘hot’ water took about 20 min to get from freezing
cold to acceptably warm, otherwise the night was surprisingly warm (despite of the outside’s subzero temperatures) and
quiet (given that there was a travelers’ bar just outside the courtyard).
The morning of my first official day
of the trip started at the Ticket Booking window of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. (You can buy train tickets at the ICBC’s special counters.) There
I learnt that tickets for Xian-Jiayuguan train were fully booked for the day, and that added to my anxiety whether I would
be able to secure a train seat (by now I would be happy with hard seater!) to Jiayguan for that evening. But I would only
know once I get to the Lanzhou train station.
In the meanwhile, I spent the morning
wondering around the Xian Great Mosque, looking for that special atmosphere that entrances me whenever I visit an Islamic
place of worship or a monument. But in Xian, I found none of these. The Mosque, despite being of gathering and praying for
some thousands of Xian’s Muslims, looks more like an officialised Chinese tourist sight, with an entry fee of RMB12.
Add to this a mile-long souvenir market en route to the Mosque. By ten o’clock of my first day in Xian I decided there
was nothing for me in that city and I needed to move to Lanzou ASAP (all I could think of was getting to Jiayuguan the following
morning).
On my way back to the hostel to collect
my bag I popped in to a travel agency and was told that there was a flight to Lanzhou
leaving at 13:00, almost three hours earlier than my booked flight, and I decided to try to take it. On arrival to the airport,
however, I learnt that the flight to Lanzhou already left,
at 12:00, and in fact my flight at 16:40 was the earliest possible, which left me with a few hours in Xian airport.
I tried my luck with the Ticket Booking
desk whether it would be possible for me to fly to Jiayuguan on that day, either direct, or via Lanzhou, or even Beijing,
but the answer was a firm NO: possibly, my Hong Kong travel agent was right and the Jiayuguan airport was not operational.
(Possibly: one never knows for sure until one knocks at the airport’s door).
After a few hours of waiting it was
no surprise that I was the first in the check-in queue – this would later repeat on all the following flights; almost
all my boarding passes on that trip show Sequence #001. Having spent a few hours in each Xian, Lanzhou and Dunhuang airports I became quite familiar with these…
Upon landing in Lanzhou, I asked the airport official for the way to the airport bus, and was the first -
from my plane - to board the bus. When I am driven by a goal nothing comes between me and the goal. This time, the goal was
the ticket to Jiayuguan.
During an hour’s drive from the
airport to Lanzhou city, I immediately noticed change in landscape from Xian, and especially
from Hong Kong. The land was barren with hardly tree, or grass, in sight, and there was a
medium-height mountain range on one side of the road.
The bus stopped somewhere
in Lanzhou and I immediately switched to the taxi showing
the driver a written Chinese word for the train station. Lanzhou
train station was big and foreign at 7:30 in the evening – there was not a single word in English… I grabbed the
first uniformed person and asked him to help me to buy ticket to Jiayuguan. Having identified the appropriate ticket window
(the only one with a queue) he shouted at the queue looking for someone who spoke English. Quickly, one guy stepped forward
and asked me where I wanted to go. And – oh heaven – the ticket was bought for me for the hard sleeper for the
train departing at 10 pm. I was very happy, and my newly acquired Chinese friends were also very happy seeing me so happy
J
The task was then to find a place to
eat, wash and re-pack for my train journey. I walked to a hotel opposite the train station and entered their restaurant…
turning heads and enjoying stares, FINALLY! Up until then my presence in the life of China went almost unnoticed.
Still with an hour before the train
departure, I stumbled across a “Soldier Entertainment lounge” and entered it with confidence (surely they wouldn’t
want a singe foreign woman waiting for the train on the street or on the floor of the train station? The attendant asked me
to pay RMB 5 and left me alone. The train was full and my berth was the very top one, and despite some snores coming from
the bottom two berths I spent a pleasant night and had no trouble sleeping. I was finally moving towards my target:
Lanzhou
– Jiayuguan 765 km
Jiayuguan
I was met at the train station a driver
whom I booked from Hong Kong. My friend has called him the night before and gave my train
arrival details (which I SMSed from Lanzhou). The driver spoke
NO English and therefore we went along fine – we were to drive to Jiayuguan Fort, the Great Wall and then onward to
Dunhuang, across the Gobi desert (six hours).
We arrived at the Fort before its opening
time (8:30 am), and I was the first visitor that morning, followed by two PLA soldiers. They must have a good life these PLA
people as I meet them everywhere, at every tourist site! It was freezing cold, however, and the windchill froze my hands so
that changing settings on my camera took me a few minutes each time, with painfully slow finger movements.
From Frommers: “At the northwest
end of the narrow Hé Xi corridor lies a fort that marks the western extremity of the Míng Great Wall. During the Míng dynasty,
Jiayùguan was regarded as the end of the Chinese world, beyond which lay the strange lands and peoples of the western lands…”
I walked up the Fort walls and stared
at the vast desert spreading in all four directions. Quite a change from Xian, and especially from Hong
Kong – not a single tree in sight; not a single person or a vehicle. You forget you are in China. You forget you are in the 21st century, the life here is still
and silent. But - what is that noise? I suddenly hear gentle sound of bells ringing in the wind and I think I am hallucinating
– there is no one else except me and the soldiers and the Gobi desert. Hang on, I am
definitely hallucinating – I see two horsemen riding in the desert in the direction of the Fort. I move to another side
and I see several camels resting about half a kilometer away from the walls of the fortress; there are horses and men, too,
and the group looks to me very much like an ancient Silk Road caravan.
Who were they – travelers, camel
minders or workers of the Fort amusement park (if such exists) – I will never know. But this moment is now carved in
my memory as my silk road moment. I travel for such moments… when a fantasy becomes reality, and reality looks like
a fantasy.
It was time to go back, and I was freezing
and longing for hot tea and breakfast. It was already 10 o’clock. On my way back I have counted three 20-strong Chinese
tourist groups at the start of their excursion. Arrive early, my advice, and you will get out-of-this-world experience, otherwise,
you’ll be stuck among several tourists groups.
Next, we drove to the Overhanging Great
Wall (strange name, don’t you think?), and the driver advised me not to pay to enter but take a photo from the outside
of the tourist complex. Truly, you can see the wall from there and paying the fee would bring you several hundred meters closer,
but what is several hundred meters for the Great Wall of China? I went to Jiayuguan to see
the Wall; I discovered the Fort and fell in love with it, the Wall became a second class tourist attraction not worth paying
the entrance fee for…
We got back to the Jiayuguan Fort,
for a quick chicken noodle made at a private kitchen next to the Fort’s entrance. Just in time as I was almost fainting
from hunger. Now I was ready to hit Gobi!
Jiayuguan – Dunhuang (may be, 400 km? felt like a thousand )
On the map, there is a highway between
Jiayuguan and Dunhuang, but in reality most of it is either being repaired or under construction (I wasn’t able to figure
that out). Therefore, about two thirds of the way is driven on terrible unpaved side roads. For a private vehicle it takes
at least six hours, for a bus – around ten. Hence my hiring a driver to pick me up at the Jiayuguan train station, take
me to the Fort and then drive me to Dunhuang. For this, I paid RMB 800 and this was out-of-season price.
Off we went! The sun was already high
in the sky, and it quickly became uncomfortably hot in the car. Yet opening windows was not possible because of the sand storm
which we had to drive through during the first few hours. I don’t know how they do it, the drivers in the Gobi, as the visibility is extremely poor and any passing truck (and there was plenty of them) leaves
behind it a huge cloud of sand. I asked to stop the car to take a photo of the road, and possibly to get some fresh air and
stretch legs, but once I got out I quickly abandoned the idea of the fresh air and stretching – it was (1) cold; (2)
windy and (3) dusty. From there, we made no more “photo stops”…
The last one third of the road was
newly constructed stretch of the Dunhuang highway with beautiful asphalt surface, smooth as baby’s bottom. By then,
however, the trip ceased to become an exciting venture of desert crossing and simply became a waiting game ‘when will
we finally get there?’ Driving across the desert is no fun, it is very monotonous and extremely boring, for there is
NOTHING around to rest your eyes on, there is only road in front of you and THAT’S IT. Even passing vehicles became
very scarce. The only other source of entertainment were road workers units located at regular distances along the new highway,
building up and painting the edge of the road with white and black stripes.
Heat, monotony and hunger (we haven’t
eaten anything since Jiayuguan) led me to hallucinating in the last hour of the journey – every five minutes or so I
thought I saw signs of Dunhuang on the horizon, but every time these disappeared and became desert again. When I have given
up hope of reaching Dunhuang, we have suddenly entered the city.
Dunhuang
In Dunhuang, I chose to stay at the
Dunhuang Hotel, on the recommendation from the LP Thorn Tree. Since this was still low season, the hot water was only available
for two hours in the evening, the heating was unreliable and mostly absent, and there was only one person in the hotel who
spoke some English (but not all). Otherwise the room was a bargain for Rs120.
My main reason for going to Dunhuang
was not Mogao Caves, not the Singing Sand
Dune with the Moon Lake,
not anything else around Dunhuang – the reason I went there was because Dunhuang was the city with an airport that was
nearest to Jiayuguan. Since I had limited time to spend on the trip, I had to fly at least one way, and taking a flight between
Dunhuang and Lanzhou allowed me to save over 20 hours of a
train journey.
Anything else in Dunhuang – visiting
Mogao Ku, Sand Dune – was a bonus.
So, with a whole day in Dunhuang, I
took the CITS tour bus to Mogao Ku in the morning and went to the Singing Sand Dune in the afternoon.
I don’t have much to say about
Mogao… I have seen the insides of the caves before, on a Silk Road exhibition in London,
and I knew what to expect. Besides, and may be for that exact reason, I joined a Chinese-only guided group and just followed
them blindly from one cave to another, without understanding a single word of the guide’s explanation. I prefer it this
way – with English-speaking guides foreigners are expected to keep expressing their polite admiration of local wonders
and the guides find it strange if they don’t (and I am not polite enough to pretend that I am astonished when I am not).
I was amazed by the size of the construction,
though. There are about 500 caves in total, but you are shown may be twenty of them on a single visit.
One version of the story behind the
creation of the caves deserves mentioning. Every time a merchant was embarking on a journey to the West, along the Silk Road, he commissioned a shrine to Buddha and other deities to secure protection and success of
the venture. May you all be blessed, the travelers of the past, your courage in crossing the Gobi
desert only equal to your unwavering faith in Buddha and his fellow deities.
The Singing Sand Dune and
the Moon Lake
are about three kilometers south of Dunhuang and are easily accessible by a public bus. I actually heard the dunes singing,
believe it or not, when I was climbing them – although I only lasted three or four dunes before turning back. Down at
the base are herds of camels for carrying tourists to and from the Moon
Lake (Chinese tourists mainly). Next to the lake, there is an apple tree
garden, and here I found the real spring, which I missed so much in Hong Kong – apple
tree blossom contrasting with the sand dunes surrounding the lake. What’s more, I found lilac plant (сирень) which I have not seen since I left Russia. It was blossoming, too.
My plane was leaving early in the morning
of the following day.
Dunhuang – Lanzhou – Xian
I was so much afraid of missing the
flight, the only flight to Lanzhou that week, that I was at
the airport before it was open, and even before there was ANY light in the airport building! Naturally, I was the first at
the check-in again.
Xian
Back in Xian, I decided to treat myself
to 24 hour hot water and reliable heating, and went straight to Sheraton Xian hoping to use my SPG points for the stay - hotels
in China are quite cheap, points-wise.
Cheap, but not yet connected to the rest of the world, so I had to use hotel’s
business centre to make booking online instead of doing it at the front desk (!)
That sorted, I had an afternoon and
a morning of the following day free in Xian. I decided to go for a walk on the Xian
City Wall… It is 13.8 km long, I thought I’d make it in two
hours, but it took me 2 hr 45 min, the last 45 minutes being most difficult. Most people take a bike tour along the Wall (I
should say, most foreign tourists – Chinese tourists take a bus to go around the Wall) but I wanted to stretch my legs
after flying for half a day.
The following morning I went to visit
the Big Goose Pagoda, the tower which was built for Huan Tsang. Huan Tsang was a monk in ancient China,
during times when Xian was the capital of China,
a thriving, cosmopolitan city. He traveled to the West and South, beyond the western gates of China
(see above), to India to study Buddhism.
Seven years later, he came back and brought with him Buddhist manuscripts that he undertook to translate into Chinese. This
he did sitting in the Big Goose Pagoda. Unfortunately nothing remains of Huan Tsang or his manuscripts, the pagoda is empty
inside safe for a calligraphy souvenir shop.
Yep, this was my second stay in Xian
and I didn’t go to see Terracota Warriors. Not that I have something against them, but they have never been a priority
– there have been many places and things in China
that I would love to see, but the warriors are not yet among them.
