Day 6: Dunhuang

We're officially out of Xinjiang at this point - our train arrived in Liuyuan, Gansu Province at some obscenely early hour and we were immediately shoved onto a bus to Dunhuang. The travel agency was scheduled to provide us breakfast, but they never did. Richard and I, banking on the fact that we would be stopped in Liuyuan for at least long enough to get breakfast, decided to wait until we got off the train to go to the bathroom. This was a bad decision, because there was no (discernible) bathroom in the train station, no stop for breakfast, and a 2 hour ride in the jouncy backseat of a bus full of Chinese tourists before we got to somewhere with a bathroom. We distracted ourselves by telling riddles, which was admittedly a pretty fun time.

We stopped at a hotel to go to the bathroom, although since we weren't staying there we didn't really have a place or opportunity to do things like change our clothes or brush our teeth. Traveling in China seems to involve a mandatory lowering of personal hygienic standards. I learned to appreciate my toothbrush so much more. We thought they were going to give us breakfast at the hotel, but they didn't. Nice.

From Dunhuang we took a bus out to the Mogao Caves, a group of caves carved into the mountain with big Buddhas and cool paintings inside them. There was a small fiasco over tickets because, on the way there, we had asked the tour guide if there were student discount tickets and she totally ignored us, but when we got there, saw that there was an 80 kuai student discount (that's a lot of money!), and asked her to get us student tickets, she said that it was too late and she had already bought the tickets. I was really annoyed because the travel agency we went through was a student travel agency and should have known that we could get student discount tickets, and then it wouldn't have been so expensive. Grrrr. I wanted to go back to the ticket counter and argue for a refund, but Casey really didn't want to bother, so we took the alternate route of being grumpy.

Mogao Caves are actually a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so the people who worked there spoke some English, and all of the exhibits in the little attached museum had English on them, which was nice for a change. I even got scolded in English by an employee for looking at a cave on my own, without a tour guide. There didn't seem to be any good reason why this wasn't allowed...Communism, maybe?

But yeah, Mogao has the second biggest Buddha in China (the first is somewhere in Sichuan Province), and it's carved out of the mountain inside a big cave, and it was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take pictures at the caves, so you'll have to take my word for it: it was cool. It's a really good thing that UNESCO protects that site, because they took a lot more precautions to preserve original relics than most Chinese tourist sites. The Chinese are notorious for exploiting historical and cultural places for tourism, even if places get kind of destroyed in the process. Whoops.

We went back to the hotel for lunch, where we had okay food and undrinkably awful tea while watching Home Alone 2: Lost in New York dubbed hilariously in Chinese. It was fabulous.

This day was completely redeemed in the afternoon, however, because we went off into the desert and rode CAMELS! We had to wear big orange booties to keep the sand out of our shoes, and there were humongous and very picturesque sand dunes to ascend via camel and then to climb up some more and sled down in the sand and then get back on the camel and return to the bottom. I loved the camels! They were really laid-back animals, and they just kind of grooved along up the edge of the huge dune while the sun beat down. It was an incredibly sunny day, and the sky was blue, and I got a little bit sunburnt, but it wasn't actually hot because there was all kinds of breeze blowing over the dunes. The only downside to breeze is that it blows sand at you. By the end of the day I had sand in my EVERYWHERE, from my socks to my hair to my underwear. It was impressive, and not entirely comfortable.

Me and my camel. I named him Luobo (Chinese for carrot) because it sounds a lot like the Chinese word for camel, and they kept getting mixed up in my brain:


















Don't I look intrepid or something?

And oh, those stylish neon orange sand booties:


















We had dinner at the same hotel we'd been returning to all day, and it was actually quite nice because the other tourists had gone somewhere else and it was just the three of us. In the evening we went out strolling around Dunhuang, which is actually a fabulous little town. There were strings of lights hanging all over the streets, and it seemed like every resident of little ol' Dunhuang was out strolling too. It was a really nice atmosphere. We went to the town's night market, which was fun, but the stuff wasn't anywhere near as awesome as in the Kashgar Uyghur market. What can ya do.