China. More importantly first visit to the First Lounge

[bPeteb]

Had lunch and room temperature beers at a café that we’d been looking for without success and then stumbled onto. Cold drinks are not good for your chi so the Chinese just aren’t into cold beer cold coke, cold anything. In the big cities it was easier to get cold drinks but regional not so much. Everything just came off a shelf.



Or in the case of this café from a beer fridge that just wasn’t plugged in.

 

[bPeteb]

Back in the hotel and some steps that weren't quite right, even for seven foot tall Chinese basketballers...



and the first of many interesting hotel compendiums

 

[bPeteb]

At 4 we were picked up and taken to the Echoing/Singing Sand Dunes and Crescent Lake. This was pretty bloody funny, and weird, but mostly funny.



If you look up Crescent Lake you see pictures of what looks like a beautiful oasis when it is in fact a reconstruction of a old temple next to a lake that has apparently never emptied. Around it is a desert theme park complete with what seemed like thousands of camels



quad bikes, helicopters, ultralights and thousands of Chinese wearing bright orange ‘shoe protectors’



I was one of the smart few wearing sandals.

 

[bPeteb]

We paid 100 for a super hilarious camel ride.

You weren’t supposed to take your own pictures so that they could take them for you.

Helen started with a couple of us as we started off



Stuff that. We’d paid admission, we’d paid for the camel ride, I was taking my own pictures. What followed about a third of the way along the Silk Road caravan was a stand-off between me and the withered old (?) lady pulling our camels along. She wanted to get my phone off me to take our picture. Not a chance. She kept gesturing for my phone, I kept saying no. Finally she gave up.



Then you climb a very big dune to look down on to the lake. Those dayglo boots were more a hindrance than a help to the people wearing them and they must have been hell hot.

If you removed the thousands of people it might have looked pretty. You couldn’t and it didn’t. We’d visited the dune lakes of Sao Luis in Brasil a year before. They were beautiful. This was a sandy them park.

 

[bPeteb]

We went down to the temple and the lake and took a few pictures. I'd kept telling Al we were getting our photos taken but he was either in denial or thought I was imagining it. As we were walking away from the temple Al found himself in a photographer’s sights. Al turned around and found himself staring down the lens of a big Canon. The guy quickly spun away and pointed his camera at a very sad nearby tree but Al knew it was not my imagination.



The whole place was quite the experience.

 

[bPeteb]

It was close to dinner time by the time we got back to town. We told Helen we wanted to eat in the market. No dinner was included on the first night so we thought this would be easy. Helen got out with us and then started looking for a restaurant. I know she was just trying to be helpful but her lack of English wasn’t helping.

Al, with great patience, finally explained that we just wanted to wander through the market and grab some local food. Still not sure if Helen understood why we wanted to do what we wanted to but she eventually left us. Some deep-fried things with meat of some kind in them and then some fantastic lamb skewers that took much longer than expected to cook. The people at the restaurant sat us down and gave us tea while they were cooked then put the delicious cubes of meat into a takeaway container so we could eat on the run.

 

[bPeteb]

The show wasn’t until 8:30 but Helen wanted to leave at 7:30. We drove the 10 minutes to the completely over the top theatre complex and then wasted the next 40 minutes wandering round until we could go in.



Time management was a bit of a theme. Helen could not work out times. It never took as long to get somewhere, or to do something as she thought. We spent a lot of time filling time.

 

[bPeteb]

The show – we didn’t need to upgrade to A as the C seats were in the same row as ours, just at the side. It was long. The costumes were beautiful. The dancing was good. It was not the gymnastics extravaganza I was expecting. I wouldn’t bother if you visit Dunhuang. Find the one performed on the edge of the dunes. We both struggled to stay awake and were very glad to get in the car and go back to the hotel.

 

[Straubs]

Great TR. Good to hear the good and bad about the trip. Love the custard tart photo!

 

[bPeteb]

Great TR. Good to hear the good and bad about the trip. Love the custard tart photo!

Thanks Straubs.

Haha! Gone before I thought about a picture!

If we added up the bad and the good the bad was so inconsequential that it affected nothing. I don't think either of us has ever come home from a trip as relaxed as we did after this one. Saying that, we've never 'private guided' like we did on this. Our first guide's English shortfall was easily overcome by either typing a word into our phones, or Al's patient persistence. It was a terrific holiday.

 

[bPeteb]

From our itinerary...

Dunhuang – Mogao Grottoes - Jia Yu Guan

Pick up at hotel, visit Mogao Grottoes. Mogao Grottoes are a group of 492 temples 25 km southeast of the centre of Dunhuang, an oasis strategically located at a religious and cultural crossroads on the Silk Road. The caves house some of the finest examples of Buddhist art across a span of 1,000 years.

Then visit Dunhuang Museum. It is a local museum for housing the cultural relics that were excavated in the Dunhuang area. Now there are over 4000 historical items contained in the museum. The museum is divided into four exhibition halls.

After the tour, take train to Jiayuguan. Dunhuang-Jiayuguan by train 7537 or similar, 15:25-21:34, hard seat (there are only hard seat tickets on this train)

Arrive at Jiayuguan and transfer to hotel.

Meal: Hotel breakfast, Chinese lunch

Excellent buffet breakfast at the hotel. We tried to stick to a Chinese breakfast most days.



hotel lobby

 

[bPeteb]

As we'd flown into Dunhuang I'd taken these pictures and asked Helen what it was.



Helen never seen it from above before but it was the Mogao Grottoes visitor's centre. Fantastic architecture.

We had to be at the centre at a specific time to see two terrific 360 degree movies (the domes in the pictures) and then board specific buses to drive out to the grottoes.



It was about a 20 minute trip out to the grottoes across the flat desert plain. The dunes and a sandstone mountain range run into each other near to Dunhuang and the grottoes are of course in the sandstone cliffs.

 

[bPeteb]

Mogao grottoes was fantastic. Limited to 6000 visitors per day so never huge crowds and only six of the accessible grottoes open in a day. I'm sure we were told there's 1000+ grottoes but this includes small niches.

At various times some not so good (freely admitted) and good restoration and preservation work has been carried out. Well meaning and ultimately very funny 'retouching' of the murals has taken place but it is now all about stabilising the cliff face and sealing some of the more precious murals inside temperature/light/humidity controlled chambers. One grotto we entered had been sued a a barracks by Russian troops at some stage in the not too distant past, including having wood burning soot generating fires lit to keep warm and to cook with.

We had an English speaking guide assigned to a group of maybe a dozen people. She was great. Super informative. Brutally honest but saying that some of those supposed untouched murals looked weirdly fresh. How terrible that I have such a distrust of cynical distrust of any official Chinese line.

Photos. No photography in all but a couple of grottoes and def no flash. Surprisingly everyone seemed to obey this instruction.

 

[bPeteb]

 

[bPeteb]

Back into town for another lunch extravaganza. Al had said to Helen that he would like to try the local ice wine. He meant a glass. We got two bottles! Helen says my gift to you. Al says no we'll pay. I'm sure total was under $20 for the two. It was actually pretty nice. Nice enough for us to carry the second bottle around for the rest of the holiday and bring it home.

 

[drron]

Really enjoying the TR.It looks like the bad was more hilarious than really bad.
Though I always take my wench with me to hotels so guess I might have problems.

 

[bPeteb]

Dunhuang Museum was another interesting example of desert architecture. You enter into a grotto and finish with a beautiful atrium

 

[bPeteb]

'Our' Silk Road tour included two train trips - this six plus hours on a hard seat, and a second overnight trip in what was originally a soft sleeper that we had changed to a deluxe soft sleeper cabin. More on that later. We had also booked two high speed train trips through
China Travel Guide. As with Tour Beijing, the contact was constant with heaps of information and links to help us. They'd told me we could pick our tickets up at any station with a ticket office and after a little bit of confusion with the number the person tried to use to print the tickets, that's what I did.

Station


The late afternoon train to Jiayuguan was quite the experience, but again, not bad, just weird, and funny.

The train looked like something out of the 50s and it possibly was


They were certainly hard seats. Our actual seats were taken by the guy with the food/drinks trolley. We were told to sit wherever we wanted. We chose seats that got the most fan coverage but that eventually came to nothing when they switched the fans off about half way into the slow, and very warm, trip.


You couldn't even open the windows, to escape

 

[bPeteb]

It was a long and interesting trip across the desert to Jiayuguan. People got on and off stations in the middle of nowhere



to work, we guess, at the giant factories we saw that made who knows what, or on the giant wind farms that disappeared into the haze.



Each small town was surrounded by a small irrigated, and farmed area.


The houses the same that we'd seen in Dunhuang. There they were being demolished to make way for sterile same/same apartment blocks



At one place they were building a new train line where they had dumped gravel on a raised sandy bed and were in the process of putting down the concrete sleepers and the new tracks. At the same place a high speed rail line appeared out of the haze on one side of the train and disappeared into it on the other.

 

[bPeteb]

The dining car seemed to have left behind at Dunhuang so we made do with the trolley food and drink. Warm beer, biscuits and chocolate cakes.



yes, that is an un-refrigerated sausage (think devon anyone who knows what that is). Our iron stomachs served us amazingly well the whole holiday.


The one thing we didn't get use to was a refusal, or inability, to use headphones when watching videos or listening to music on mobile phones. We had one guy on this train who did it for at least an hour. I gave up and put my headphones on and listened to music. They did it everywhere, but luckily not on the planes we flew on.

We arrived into Jiayuguan after 10 and driver number two took as to our hotel - The Jiu Gang Hotel - where we were given another humungous room with a ridiculously hard king bed. So hard we used the bathrobes to cushion our hips. Helen was keen for supper but we just wanted to sleep so we declined (to her surprise).