Dunhuang

Last week I did not have class on Thursday or Friday because of a holiday in China similar to Labor Day. For some reason, the school decided that Friday's classes would be rescheduled for Sunday. They can't do that, can they? Haha...

So my friends and I also took Wednesday off (as well as Sunday- who goes to class on Sunday?) to travel to the north of Gansu Province to the city of Dunhuang.

We took a sleeper-train on Tuesday night and arrived in Dunhuang on Wednesday morning. Dunhuang is a tourist city, which we're not used to. Luckily, it was the off season. The busy season started the next day, though. We saw some Buddhist caves as well as sections of the Great Wall.



The part of the Great Wall that we saw had not been reconstructed, which seems miraculous since everything else in China has been. We saw one pass of the wall which was pretty much a square boulder with a hole in it. There was a fence around it, so it wasn't that exciting. The second part of the wall we saw was made with mud, rocks, and hay. Because of the wind in the desert, some parts were only a few feet high. Most of the wall here was surrounded by a fence, but a small portion was not. It still wasn't that exciting, but how could I visit China without seeing part of the original Great Wall?




Thursday afternoon we rode camels out into the Gobi Desert and camped out in tents for the night. (Camels really do spit, and they smell bad, too.) The sand dunes were huge. We picked the highest one and climbed to the top. It took several hours and was extremely difficult because the sand was so soft. We climbed up peak after peak, gradually getting to the highest one. It was difficult to breathe at the top, but when we got there, we watched the "sunset."


That's in quotation marks because in some parts of China, it's not damaging to the eyes to stare directly at the sun. It looks like a bright, full moon, actually. As for the sunset, the sun disappeared in the polluted sky well above the horizon.



There are no words to aptly describe the Gobi Desert. It's how you might imagine it, though. Sandy, dry, few living creatures, etc. It's hot during the day and cold at night. In fact, when my friends and I climbed the sand dunes, we climbed along the ridges. One half of our bodies were hot from the sun, and the other half was cold. Some parts of the desert stretch for miles in complete flatness. Other parts, near the edges, are miles of sand dunes.

So we left Dunhuang on Friday tired and sore as well as sun burnt, sand burnt, and wind burnt. But it was definitely worth it.