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Silk Road (July 22-31, 2005)

The train station in Beijing

This tour used a train formerly used by Chairman Deng Xiao Ping. The train has been retired and is no longer used by Communist Party officials. This tour was composed almost entirely of Chinese citizens, approximately 300 of them. I was the only obvious foreigner, although I did find a Chinese-American lady from Boston on the train also. The name of the train was the "China Orient Express."

The interior of our compartment looked like this.

Pictured are myself and Danhua's parents, Madam Gong and Mr. Kuang. The train was air conditioned and quite comfortable. Our compartment slept the four of us. There were dining cars that served good Chinese meals as we rode along.

Here are the steppes of Inner Mongolia as seen through the windows of the train.

We had a short stop at the train station in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia.

The Chinese have two words for desert. Ge bi is a sparsely vegetated desert, similar to the scrublands of the American west. This is the edge of the ge bi. The vast expanse of ge bi in northern China is known in the west as the Gobi desert.

Jiayuguan

At Jiayuguan the ge bi narrows down to about 15 kilometers. In the past a fortified wall was guilt at this pass to control entry into China. This was the western terminus of the great wall in the Ming Dynasty. Now the modern city of Jiayuguan is a steel producing area. Our hotel was in the center of the city. There was a central park next to our hotel.

This statue extols the virtues of morning exercise. The citizens take it to heart. Below you can see people doing their early morning exercises on the playground and in other areas of the park.

Below Danhua and I stand before the old fortress. At least one guide book says that this is where the legendary Lao Zi delivered his Dao De Jing to the gatekeeper before disappearing from civilized view into the west.

You can see the Great Wall stretching off into the ge bi from the ramparts of the fortress.

Turpan

Turpan, an oasis town in the Gobi desert, is the lowest spot in China, and also the hottest. It is considerably below sea level, as is Death Valley in the US. It is famous for its grapes, grown with water from a centuries old underground irrigation system that brings water in from the mountains.

Uygur girls dancing and serving grapes.