Liyuan Hotel Dunhuang

... constant travel, so we decided to take it really easy. We spent the morning exploring the dunes.
We all decided against the camel rides but decided to go for the jeep safari across the dunes.
Quite good fun. The sand below the surface actually consists of tiny and heavy-ish bits of stone. The dunes don't really get pushed out of shape because of this. The surface sand just gets blown up by the ...

... only see a handful of caves. The caves suffered badly at the hands of an earthquake so to support them new fronts were built but these looked like 60's style urban concrete so ruined any impression of gaining a feel for what they looked liked. The frescos inside the caves were amazing and there was a really cool HUGE Buddha but overall we left a bit disappointed.

Time for another long train journey.

... so I'll take her word for it.

Our last night in Dunhuang we camped in the Gobi desert! And, of course, even though it hadn't rained in 6 months, it rained the night we were there. The dunes were just like the giant sand dunes that you see movies. After we set up our tent a bunch of us started hiking up different sand dunes. The dunes are really deceptive because there is no frame of reference when your in the desert; everything looks the same. A dune looks like it is ...

... as the Chinese are now, they were even more so in the past. The sculptors had coated the soft sandstone Buddha's and caves with plaster and straw. This has effectively managed to keep the caves in good shape for the past 1500 years since their founding in 366AD. Eighteen monasteries, 1400 monks and nuns and countless others once made this home, although the collapse of the Silk Route in the Yuan dynasty caused the ...

... les Yungang caves qu'on a visités dans le coin de Datong, mais celles-ci étaient ridiculement plus impressionnantes par la taille des Bouddhas (2ieme plus grand du monde, 35.5 mètres), mais surtout pour leur état vraiment mieux conservés. Il y avait des sculptures et des peintures muralles qui dataient de 1700 ou 1800 ans, mais qui avaient l'air d'avoir été achevée la veille. En plus on avait la chance d'avoir un ...

... I told you how much I hate headwinds! And to make matters worse the wind continued throughout the night, which didn't help at all as the noise was so loud, i would describe it as the sound of a subway inside my tent...I think I slept for 1 hour at the most, not that we need much sleep on this trip..oh dear! DAY 124&125 "3,500km to Beijing" - 280km ..the roadsigns to Beijing have started to appear, sounds so close but still so far. The temperatures are getting colder ...

... CADlink, liebenswerten, SignLab, flexisign, casmate,Dongle, sandblast, Stempel, Stempel, Hersteller, Exporteure ...

Dunhuang by Dan The train ride to Dunhuang was memorable for two reasons. The first was the game of charades I played with a policeman who turned up at about 10 o'clock that night. Unint**ested in any of the oth** passeng**s, the policeman strode smartly through the carriage up to me, frowned, and said something in Chinese. I shook my head and held up my palms to show that I didn't und**stand. Not to be put off, he said the same thing, loud** this time. Seemingly he was und** the ...

... what's so funny about that? Nothing...the humor comes in the fact that the brand for this stove was Haowife (hao means good in Chinese)...pure coincidence? macho-chauvinism? I guess we'll never know... Oct. 2 - This day started out with an organized tour of the Mogao Grottoes. We booked a tour with the travel agency located outside our hotel and left at around 8am. We found some baozi and boiled eggs to eat on the way. (This was ...

... meant we could only walk around it. A touch of green nearby showed a water source. I presume it was the reason the fort was set up here but who knows what the landscape was like 2000 years ago. There were hills to the north but otherwise flat desert everywhere. On the road here as we left Dunhuang the landscape went straight from green farmland to sand. Although in places there were low green bushes perhaps cactus. It was an hour's drive through the desert to Yadan ...