Lugu Lake, August 6-9

You know those "places you have to see before you die"? Well, I don't mean to imply coming to Lugu Lake will surely send you to your grave (although it's quite possible considering the 8 hour mountain bus trip it takes to get here and to get away), no, it is - hands down - the most beautiful lake I have ever been to. Chrystal clear water that appears to be a deep turquoise color because the lake is so deep, nestled between mountains that look like hills because the lake sits at 2,700m, and almost no-one in sight apart from two or three villages you can see a and few lonely fishing boats... Ok, there is one village which has been hyped up for tourists, i.e. there are souvenir shops (mostly the local silver made into jewelery), guesthouses and cafe's with internet access (and bad restaurants, unfortunately). Other villages are trying to catch up, we saw a lot of new (charming looking) guesthouses going up, but right now transportation around the lake is completely unorganized, there is no regular bus route, and as long as the mini-vans keep charging such horrendous prices (200yuan for a 20min ride), not many people are going to make it into the smaller villages.

The only non-perfect thing about the lake? You're not allowed to swim in it! Well, they can't put signs everywhere, and we saw a few locals take a plunge, so we followed suit... of course it started raining (after weeks of uninterrupted good weather!) at that very moment.

Another great thing about Yunnan - wild mushrooms! In other parts of China they are hard to get and very expensive, but here they're everywhere and soooo tasty! Usually just wok-fried, either with bacon (speck e funghi, anyone?) or with chili and scallions. If they use decent oil, it's hard to spoil!

We had booked a hotel online (it was difficult to find one on the lake, I guess all the smaller guesthouses are not listed on websites), but weren't quite sure where it was, the address just said "on the lake." So, once we got to the first village on the Sichuan side, I called them and they said "Oh, you're in Lige, well, just follow the road" (or something like that - my Chinese is not very good on the phone). People we asked had never heard of this place until finally some Mosu (the local ethnic minority) pointed us to a building on a peninsula - which is still under construction! So, we got there eventually (we climbed up the hill to the main road and haggled down a motor-rickshaw driver to a more reasonable rate than the 50yuan they wanted in the village just for driving us over the hill) and it turns out that the main building is indeed still under construction, but they have a few villas that are already rented out. We got a room with lake view and bath tub right in front of the window to better enjoy it. Apart from everything being a bit unfinished, the rooms were great. And the service very personal - they always asked us what time we'd want breakfast and when they should clean our room. I started feeling a bit guilty that we were occupying so many people and seemed to be the only guests, but the last day we saw more people...

Thankfully they had already opened their restaurant, because it would have been at least a 45min walk into the next village, so we had dinner there after our arrival. At first we were all alone, but they had set two more tables and sure enough, a large group started to pour in for a banquet. Turns out it was the owner of the hotel (a Mosu, as he proudly pointed out, this might explain why the Mosu men we asked about the hotel knew it) who was giving a dinner for his friends from other parts of China, but also local Mosu and some of his staff. We were included into the festivities and first had to drink with the owner, then with his regional and sales manager - two proud Mosu women who were giving the men a run for their money - they kept drinking with everyone (the men had to down their glasses of bai jiu (strong clear liquor) whereas the women were only drinking red wine - nevertheless, they were completely hammered by the time dinner ended and everyone went to the "club" next to the hotel for some Mosu dancing. Quite a few of them put on traditional costumes and practically everyone joined in the dance, which is some kind of line dancing, I suppose. I was quite impressed how well they could remember the steps even when totally drunk. I became best new friends with the regional manager, she kept talking to me all evening about how happy she is we came to her hometown and she wants us to be happy and experience Mosu culture and... sorry... but I'm sooo drunk! :) Of course we had to join the dance and B. was offered cigarettes all the time - the cliche about Yunnanese and smoking is true! It happened to us later in the villages as well, cigarettes are the ice breaker!

Mosu are famous for one thing - their "walking marriage." They are the last minority in China that still practises this enlightened custom. Basically, they don't have any traditional marriage arrangements. Men can stay in a woman's home over night, but leave in the morning to go back to their mother's house. Children belong to the mother and paternity is not considered important. If a relationship ends, the children stay with the mother, but the mother's new partner will also take care of these children. Now, this has led to the misconception among Han Chinese (and maybe also some foreigners), that Mosu woman are always game and don't have to be treated with respect (leading to some hilarious signs - see picture). Apparently, some Han men hope to find an easy one-night stand here. If anything, it's the opposite - we could witness first hand that Mosu women are much more confident than Han Chinese, they run the show and will certainly not put out for any Han guy that shows up with too much of an ego and attitude. Of all the places we visited, the Mosu seemed to have the most Western concept of equality and a certain "normality" about male-female interactions. Among my Han friends, girls always stick together, giggling and holding hands, and male-female interaction is almost always awkward. Among the Mosu, men and women take equal part in running a business, cooking etc. I find this rather surprising, as the Mosu are also Tibetan Buddhists, and those have not exactly struck me as progressive so far...

Our stay ended on a somewhat sad note- I fell victim to altitude sickness. The reason must have been that Xichang is at only 1,600m, so we ascended over 1,000m in just one day. Symptoms include light-headedness, fatigue, shortness of breath, headache, nausea and - who knew - diarrhea (as if we hadn't had enough of this on this trip). So the eight-hour bus ride (through winding mountain roads, interrupted by mud slide induced traffic jams every half hour) it takes to get away from there turned into quite a martyrdom for me. The other eight hours it took from Xichang were already bad enough - motion sickness has always been my foe. So, no more f**ing bus rides!!!

Zigong, August 1-2

"Zigong is a pleasant surprise" - for once we agree with the Lonely Planet. There's really nothing much to say about the town, it's mostly "harmless" but certainly not touristy. It deserves the title "least gentrified city China's". It seems not to have arrived in the 21st century yet. Not that it's traditional in any way, it just looks like 1990s a lot.

Zigong

Just strolling around through the hilly lanes is quite pleasant, there's street food everywhere (tasty crispy pancake), people catch fish in the muddy river or play Mahjong in the tea houses (one in an old temple is quite cozy, another in a former guild house quite impressive). The city rose to fame because of its salt, there's a museum in a former guild house that exhibits methods of drilling and such fascinating things... the complex is beautiful, the old building has not been over-restored, so there's still original paint on the walls here and there and a layer of green moss on the stone courtyard.

And I think that's all I have to say about it.

Chengdu, July 27-31

It started off as a love affair - the hostel has clean, new (hotel standard) double rooms for the ridiculous price of 120 yuan (=$20) and we have the famous "pock-marked Grandma Chen's bean curd" right around the corner. The love wore off a bit after we discovered that their internet connection is a joke and practically useless and electricity is not a given - there's a power outage for several hours every night. They must be scheduled because the power comes back at 1am, so I guess it's to save electricity on the really hot days (of which we had a few recently, probably around 37C). But then, the roach we spotted crawling over the table in the common room didn't help...

Ah... Chengdu :) Finally back in the city! I feel much more like a fish in the water here :) It is really nice - full of parks and temples and tea houses - they're really everywhere! We went to the People's Park, which among monuments for the Martyrs of the 1911 Railroad Protection movement, also houses several tea houses that were packed to the brim. We spotted a string of white sheets of paper - at closer inspection they turned out to be personal ads for soliciting marriage. On the form you were asked to list you age, income, educational background, whether you own an apartment and if you were ever married/had kids. There were a lot from elder men, but also young people aged 27-30 were among them. The salary range I saw was 1,500-5,000RMB (so a postdoc would be in the middle range - thank goodness I don't have to worry about that anymore ;-)). I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people reading that were not looking for themselves but for their sons or daughters.

We also visited a Taoist Temple - they are becoming my favorite :) This one was called the green ram temple and is pretty huge. It has a copper goat statue which is highly revered by locals and therefore has a very shiny beard. Next to it is another statue which supposedly represents parts of all 12 zodiac animals... but we couldn't figure them out.

For dinner we tried our old strategy - go to the best hotel in town. In this case a Sofitel. The food was pretty good, but did not live up to our hopes. And they sold us something that clearly tasted like pork as deer - maybe some kind of tapir? ;-) The braised eel with preserved pork (air cured and salted) was pretty good though, it came with mushrooms. And we have to give the hotel credit for it's great cocktails (that's a first in China!) and wireless internet. So they pretty much satisfy the needs we can't get met in our hostel :) The Sheraton has the better ice cream though (chocolate ice cream over caramelized bananas? Try this at home! Topped with caramelized nuts, whipped cream and shaved chocolate) - but what are Buddhist monks doing there? Admittedly, they were only drinking what looked like apple juice, but what prompted them to go in there in the first place? Did they stay there? We already witnessed senior monks/masters being driven around in their cars and of course every single one owns a cell phone, but it's not the typical yak-butter scented image of monastic life, is it?

Chengdu is also full of street food and fresh fruit (many different kinds of melons and we had an awesome mango). Somehow it reminds me of Nanjing, though a bit less chaotic and cleaner (public toilets are actually usable - you don't faint from the smell within 5min). It feels bigger and it's more spread out. Space is maybe not so scarce here as in the east. The outskirts look a lot like Shanghai, actually - apartment buildings over apartment buildings, all at least 20 stories high, clustered in parks. The only difference is, there's more space between them (and they're not that many). I guess they'll fill that in in the coming years. We drove by one apartment complex that looked definitely American, very much L.A. like, and even the 4 lane highway with nothing left or right reminded us of the States. Downtown has older apartment buildings, many seem to be from the sixties, and although they seem to have a nice living atmosphere, the habit of just throwing garbage out of your window (sometimes onto the neighboring roof) also prevails here. Sadly.

Trip to Huanglong Xi - another yellow dragon. A village that is so picturesque, allegedly over 150 films were shot here. Well, If you ever wondered why the backdrop in Chinese films looks so fake - there you have it. According to the Lonely Planet, this place has been "beautified for tourists, but by and large it's been done right." What does that mean about wrong?! Nevertheless, we got some pretty good fish and tofu in a riverside restaurant that also had cold beer - what more can you ask for? Maybe for a little less harassment from the people offering massage or ear cleaning in tea houses. But it's quite fun to sit in this bustling atmosphere, with people gambling over cards or playing mahjong, others selling snacks, most just dozing off in the summer heat. Was it worth the one-hour bus ride here? Probably not, but we're not in any hurry...

Leshan - another touristy town that has acquired fame status, due to a 71m meter high sitting Buddha statue. The town seems to have cashed in proper, I have never seen so many fancy apartment buildings in a town this small. Well, good on them, but why can't they have something good to eat for lunch then? We followed a Lonely Planet recommendation for something "a little fancy" - did I mention that this book SUCKS???? Big time?! That was the most insulting food I had so far. What a waste of a meal. At least we found a nice coffee house, it seems to be a chain "Good wood(!) coffee"whose theme is Austrian Kaffeehaus - or their take on it at least. Everything is decorated in cutest little flower designs and the waitresses wear light blue dresses with frills and apron - couldn't help but being reminded of Austria :) They must have stolen that concept from a similar place in Japan, though, because the deep bow we received from all the waitresses was neither Austrian nor Chinese... Coolest thing - they had a GO-board! So the afternoon was saved - at least for B. who was happy to have someone who'd indulge him in playing a board game :) It was just too unbelievably hot outside anyway. We had been watching a crowd, who - under Buddhist chantings - was releasing fish into the local river. They formed a row and handed bucket-loads (literally) of fish from one to another, all the way from the water-tank truck parked on the curb down the stairs to the river bank. A few monks and nuns were there to direct the spectacle, not sure if it was them who had bought the fish to be set free. Apparently, it's a Buddhist custom to buy animals from captivity and set them free - I guess it's good for your karma and stuff. At a sizzling 37 degrees outside, I am sad to report not all the fish made it alive down to the water (they also had been cooped up in the tank that was loaded to the brim, standing in the sun) , but I guess it's the intention that counts? What else? Oh right, the giant Buddha. It sits there alright. Supposedly pacifying the waters of the fast-flowing Dadu river (which locals use to jump in the river and let themselves be hauled along, just to climb out a few hundred meters downstream - a fun past-time if the river wouldn't look so damn brown - actually, they bathe in the second river, the Minjiang, but they're both equally brown), but probably it was the rubble that fell into the stream when the Buddha was carved out of the rock that did the job. We have to stop visiting places because there's something "there."

Sichuan opera - well, the touristy version of it. We got a compilation of genres - opera, dance, music, fire spitting and face changing... unfortunately, most of the music was not live, and the singing that was was pretty bad. The male dancers clearly have a basic kung fu training, it looks like martial acrobatics (watch "Farewell my concubine" for the more or less true history of Beijing opera). The female dancers basically just walk around in tiny steps and wave their long shawls, or head feathers in this case, which had a rather comical effect. The face changing was truly impressive though. With a wave of a hand or fan they change their masks - you can't figure out how they do it even if you watch very closely. I once saw a movie about an old face changing master. The key, as I remember, was that the masks are painted on extremely thin rice paper. But I don't remember what they do with them - suck them into the mouth maybe? That would not explain the whole body costume change though... We also got a "solo" by an Erhu-player (that's a two-stringed instrument, played upright held on one's knee, which can make sounds from a howling cat to a screaming horse), which might have been good if it hadn't been for the overly sentimental background music, that was clearly not played by traditional instruments and did not feel traditional at all. The part I liked best was an excerpt from a traditional opera - the fight of Liu ??? with three ???, something about the Han dynasty shall rule... I would like to see the whole story (with English captions) and have some decent singers for a change. Those were clearly not the freshest anymore, or they were quite drunk, they seemed to have a hard time moving straight in their heavy costumes.

All in all we liked Chengdu quite a lot. It's so relaxing to be in a place where not everybody gapes at you because you're a "Longnose" and you can just go about your own business... and enjoy the good food :)

Songpan, July 25-26

Back in Nanjing! It's gonna take a while to post all the blog entries I have written on our epic journey - I hope you'll bear with me :)

This place is totally over-hyped. Supposedly it's so cute, so historic (all fake, the city wall is full of kitsch statues of guards and reproductions of catapults). It's a "gateway" to Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong Parks, but the roads are so bad (through mountains and under construction) it takes over two hours to get there. We only went to Huanglong, because Jiuzhaigou is supposedly even more crowded. To do both just seems like more of the same and they both charge considerable entrance fees (200yuan and more). Huanglong means Yellow Dragon and the name is due to the yellow limestone sediments that wind along a valley like a long Chinese dragon... ok, you need quite a bit of fantasy to see the dragon shape. But the limestone forms pools in all shades of yellow, orange, brown and the water in it has all shades of turquoise - it's really pretty. Whenever a log, root or some other natural barrier is covered with the lime stone sediment it forms an edge and altogether they make for this web of natural terraces. It has to be seen to be believed. The Unesco thought the same and declared it a World Heritage Site (we're starting to realize just how full of those China is), which means your usual good infrastructure, bus loads of tourists and high prices. Sadly, you can only follow a board walk and not roam around by yourself, but given what we saw other tourists do - throw around litter, climb over fences - it seems very necessary to preserve the park. I hate to sound judgmental, but Chinese make really terrible, inconsiderate tourists. No respect for the environment. The park's high entrance fee is probably due to the hoards of garbage collectors they employ.

Songpan is also famous for offering horse treks - but B. declined :) There's a pedestrian street in the center, but it mostly has shoe stores. And on the outskirts they are building "New Songpan," it looks as if it will double the number of inhabitants once it's occupied. All in all, absolutely not worth the torturous bus ride. But it's nice to eat some Chinese food for a change! What's the hype with all the Tibetans? Their food is miserable and everything smells like yak butter! Why always Tibet, Tibet, Tibet??? Is it so strange if a tourist in China actually wants to see Han Chinese things and eat Chinese food? The Lonely Planet seems to think so. On the other hand, their guide book for Bangkok recommends you go to Chinatown there... notice a theme?

Zoiige (Ruo'ergai), July 24

We got stuck here, because we believed the Lonely Planet that to make it from Langmusi to Songpan one needs to stay overnight. Well, it turns out they changed the bus schedule so that one can take the 7am bus to Zoiige and from there the 10am or 2:30pm bus to Songpan - but we found out too late. But whatever. It was entertaining in the sense that they really don't seem to get many tourists there, let alone foreigners. In the restaurant where we had lunch they couldn't stop giggling, even after I managed to successfully communicate with them in Chinese, they just couldn't get over themselves. One waitress was so afraid of us, she refused to come to our table and would send her colleague over instead. Just after we arrived, we opened the laptop to look on a map and immediately a crowd of 10 or so people surrounded us, talking animatedly about what the laowai were doing. They were helpful, though, and pointed us to the bank. When we had lunch in a hot pot restaurant (not bad) and B. went to the bathroom, I immediately had the neighboring table crowding and interrogating me. The usual "where are you from? How old? What do you do? Married? Kids?" So much for small talk... Several people felt obliged to welcome us "to China" :) Much nicer than the usual crowd trying to sell us stuff or rip us off. There was genuine curiosity, and although I wouldn't like to be the town's curio attraction every day, it was a nice change for once.

The most exciting event was actually my second phone interview, this time in a really crappy but nevertheless horrendously pricey hotel room (walls with mold stains and a filthy bathroom for 480RMB=$80!) Again, I was quite nervous, but I got the job! So, starting November, I will be interning with Tostan in Washington DC, an organization you should totally check out, I am very excited about their ideas and approach. Maybe I should start a new blog - "Academic goes NGO" or something like that - and inspire hordes of frustrated physicists to leave research and take up non-profit work :) I can already see it - being single-handedly responsible for the downfall of string theory because they run out of (wo)manpower :-P Wouldn't that be something?

Langmusi, July 21-23

Seems I have to eat my own words... small villages with muddy roads and open sewage can indeed be charming. I can't explain what's so much nicer about Langmusi that I actually enjoy staying here - I guess to a large extend it's the people. They do get quite a few tourists here, because it's on the road from Xiahe to Songpan, two rather famous places, and they also have two monasteries and a mosque that are worth a visit. Still, people seem rather unspoiled and natural. for some reason, they marvel at digital cameras and always want to have their picture taken - I am not sure what the great appeal is of seeing yourself on the display of the camera. It's not that they want a picture with us or of us (although that happened too), most of the time they ask us to photograph them.


Langmusi sits directly at the border of two provinces, a small stream divides the village into Gansu and Sichuan side. It's surrounded by what looks like rolling hills but are actually 3,600m high mountains. We are at over 3,000m in the village itself. No altitude sickness so far although physical activity is more streneous than usual. We opted out of the suggestion of a 2-day hike to the highest mountain and did a one-day horse trek instead, which seemed the more relaxing thing to do. Well, I enjoyed it a lot, but I think B. would have preferred to walk :) His horse seemed to be a donkey in disguise, never went where it was supposed to. We had lunch at a nomad family tent,
but it wasn't quite as romantic as it sounds - they just left the food there for us and went outside, we ate together with our guide, who wasn't really so much of a guide. Because of us being foreigners, he restricted his commands to "hello!" (meaning we were going in the wrong direction) and "ok, ok!" All my attempts at engaging him in a Chinese conversation didn't make things much better, although we did understand each other fairly well.

The village is surrounded by grasslands with myriads of flowers, it's indescribably beautiful. We rode to the spring of the Tiger River, the stream that supplies Langmusi with water. And while the water is clear and fresh up at the spring and probably drinkable quality, the further down you get to the village the more garbage it contains. And scarily, people wash their clothes and food right in the center of the village where the water is the dirtiest. Some guide books actually seem to find that romantic. Any leftover food is also simply thrown in the ditch. We could witness some "green energy" use, however - solar powered water kettles :)

Right now is festival time for the Tibetan monks, so they get to go out from their monastery and sit around on the grasslands, having picnics, relaxing in tents. We walked by a Tibetan nomad couple who were just hanging out in the grass and motioned us to come over and sit with them. The woman (hung with jewelery and dressed in traditional Tibetan skirt, which is wrapped around the waist, sits very high, and is held by a huge silver-decorated belt) didn't speak any Mandarin at all, the man about as much as I :) We still figured out they wanted pictures taken, even with us, and they actually want us to send them to them, which is rather non-trivial, as they don't seem to have an address. A youth on his colorful motorbike (clearly a horse-surrogate, the men here like to drape colorful blankets over their motorbikes as if they were saddles) came by and offered his address. I can't really read his handwriting, but once back in Nanjing I'll figure out a way to mail the pictures.

The only annoying thing (apart from the power outage in our guesthouse, but at least cell phone reception was great, because I had my first phone interview for my internship here) are the Sichuan monks who are real lay-ways. They claim the path one needs to take to get to the Tiger gorge goes through their monastery, so they charge an entrance fee, even if you only want to go hiking. The gorge is gorgeous (hah!), it was a bit crowded when we went on a sunny day, maybe due to the festival. It also looks a bit like full of garbage but those are shawls, usually in white and yellow, presented as an offering to the Buddha (or tiger?) There are also huge piles of wooden spears. We were told it's because this festival commemorates the arrival of Buddhism - some monk told the fighting nomads of the grasslands to give up their weapons, so they piled them all on a mountain and burned them ("gave them back to God").

And best of all - in Langmusi there's good food, Tibetan as well as Sichuan, so we finally got some veggies, but also the Tsampa (Barley stuff) here tastes good. And there's wireless internet in two places! It's a nice place to just hang out and relax. It's a bit cold for my taste, never really above 20 degrees, I miss the desert :) As I type this I'm sitting in a little cafe run by a couple of Tibetan sisters (recognizable by their jewelery, straight noses and language, of course). One is sitting next to me and we chat a little with our limited Mandarin. She's also leaning over trying to see what I type but admits she doesn't recognize anything. Tibetan script looks kinda cool, but I can't make out a single word. That might be how she feels about English. And as you can see, our laptop attracts a lot of attention :)

Xiahe, July 18-20

The bus ride from Lanzhou was really interesting, because the first couple of hours we drove through mostly Muslim areas - I have never seen so many mosques in my life, every village seemed to have at least two. Often they are a mixture of Chinese and oriental architecture - for example a six-corner pagoda, made from wood beams with typical chinese patterns, topped by a large golden dome with the half-moon. The further south we got, the more we saw Tibetan Buddhist temples (recognizable by their prayer flags).

Xiahe, a tiny town consisting of only one muddy street inhabited by Han at the eastern end, Tibetans at the western end and Muslim Hui in the middle, is home to the Labrang monastery - one of the six major monasteries of the Yellow Hat sect (only two are outside Tibet). It was founded in 1709 and housed 4,000 monks during its prime time. During the cultural Revolution they suffered some setbacks, but were able to preserve a lot of their temples. Today, they teach Buddhist Philosophy, Medicine and other fields at six colleges. Right now they have about 1,200 monks living there. Pilgrims walk the "kora" - the pilgrim's path around the monastery - from dawn till dusk and keep turning prayer wheels. One can visit the inside, but only with a guided tour and no pictures allowed - except for the Yak butter sculpture museum -

and yes, that's just as weird as it sounds. Yak butter is also used as fuel for lamps throughout all the temples, which makes for a rather interesting smell, and as a condiment for tea, bread and pretty much anything else it seems (my theory is that it also serves as body lotion, which would explain the smell of people).

The town has a very strange vibe to it. The - without exception - crappy looking hotels are all booked out, the main street is bustling with monks in red robes and Tibetans (starring cowboy hats and large knives), a lot of them pilgrims. I don't feel any of the friendly "vibe" the Lonely Planet talks about. The men are extremely rude in staring, as far as just sitting next to me in a tea house and trying to read what I am writing on a postcard or typing on the laptop. Everyone - Han, Hui or Tibetan - is trying to rip us of, trying to sell us water for 5RMB (normal price 2RMB) or not giving me any change at the bus station in the hope I wouldn't be able to read the bus ticket (I even suspect the man in the post office!) Maybe I'm failing to grasp the Tibetan Romanticism that seems to have struck all the other western tourists here, who walk around with glowing faces and buy cheap silver jewelery. This place could be really nice, it's nestled between mountains (we're at 3,000m here) and today there is a beautiful clear sky and crisp air (quite cold after Dunhuang). But all the garbage piles on the side of the street and the fact that there is construction going on everywhere - the last two items seem to describe almost ever town in China - spoils it quite a bit. Right now the main street is torn open left and right, possibly to lay sewage pipes (the rest of the village obviously does not have a sewage system, there's only a ditch on the side of the road and everyone - man, woman, pig - just pees on the street). I can already see how this place will become another Disneyland type Eldorado in a few years. But frankly, I fail to see the charme in small towns that have never undergone any "beautification" - at least in China. I hate myself for saying that, but the average Chinese village seems to be an unattractive heap of dirt and garbage (piled on the side of the street and set on fire from time to time). Maybe I'm just conditioned to Europe's "small town romanticism" - I failed to find Newfoundland pretty just as well - but I can be charmed by small Italian or French villages that have nothing special to offer apart from a pretty setting. But China fails to charm me... I guess I'm having quite a downer after two weeks on the road. Maybe I need a break.

Special food - everything made of yak, from yak meat over yak milk and yoghurt to yak butter (which is also put in tea and tastes slightly salty). Tsampa - a porridge of roasted barley. Rice with sugar in yak milk (tastes kinda buttery). A "cake" made from yak butter and wheat flour with red beans(?), which is more like cookie dough, didn't seem baked at all. Supposedly there's momo - boiled dumplings, but what we had was rather steamed, and most certainly not fresh. The Tibetan diet seems almost veggie-free, I'm dying for somehting green and leafy. It's all very dry and starchy, mixed with milk or yoghurt (which is really good, I admit).

Dunhuang, July 13-17

Realizing we had seen what there is to see in Jiayuguan (and more), we decided to cut our stay there short and head on to Dunhuang - a famous oasis town on the Silk Road. After a quite hazardous 5 hour bus ride (during which we miraculously had to switch buses, which was not planned) with a driver who treated the dashed line in the middle line as a target line and always centered the bus on it - honking angrily at the opposing traffic which forced him into the right lane, and the most aggressive cab drivers at the bus station - they actually tried grabbing and pulling us to their cars - we checked into a Tang-dynasty style hotel, which has several courtyards, a "castle" and the rooms are decorated with folk art and have stone floors with oriental carpets on them. Again, it seems to be planned for hundreds of people, who have miraculously failed to show up.

Dunhuang is most famous for Mo Gao Ku, or Thousand Buddha caves - this is a cave complex about 20km outside of town, which literally contains thousands of Buddhas. At its peak the site housed 18 monastries and over 1400 monks and nuns - according to the Lonely Planet. Wealthy traders would donate money to create new caves, to pray (or give thanks) for a safe journey across the west. After the first cave was created in 366AD, this became a real hype until the end of the Yuan dynasty, when the complex was sort of forgotten. Every cave contains several Buddha statues and immense wall paintings, which are amazingly well-preserved. The place became really famous after a Taoist monk discovered a huge forgotten library of Buddhist scriptures in a cave. Unfortunately, he sold most of it off to foreign explorers (German and French), and when you take a guided tour through the caves (the only way to visit, you can't just wander around on your own) they don't fail to point out what has been stolen by Americans- they often removed wall paintings by chizzling off the top layer of stone. Most impressive is a 35m high sitting Buddha, which used to be housed in a 4-storey temple, so that its head would look out of the roof. When it was restaurated during the Qing(?), the building got another 5 storeys, so the Buddha is now completely covered. Unfortunately, the outside of the cave complex has a loveless wall from the 60s (it looks like 60s, too), but they needed to stabilize the walls because of frequent earth quakes. The caves are also protected by doors (with numbers on them), so that I couldn't help but feel it looks like a prison... a Buddha prison :)

Although popular with tourists, Dunhuang is not crowded and people are quite laid-back, so that we seldom got harassed by vendors. They gentrified city center is also rather small, so you don't feel lost like in Jiayuguan. Some pedestrian streets make it a nice place to stroll and we enjoyed the peace and quiet of the town so much that we stayed longer and mostly just hung out, either on our rooftop cafe (where I submitted my internship application! :)) or in the streets where all the restaurants have tables outside. It's unbearably hot here during daytime, probably reaching 40 degrees, and with the huge sand dunes (Mingshan is 1700m high) in the background one gets a real desert feeling. Since that was not enough, we also went on a 3-day camel ride through the desert.

We started off at 6pm, since it was an especially hot day, starting from our guide's house - Li Shifu (he's also a shifu, but not like my kungfu teacher, he's the skilled-expert kind of shifu) has been doing these kind of tours for almost 30 years. Whereas we came prepared with sunscreen, hats, long (white) clothes and sunglasses, he just set off with a bunch of keys and his cell phone, looking as if he was just going around the corner buying cigarettes. As soon as we had reached the sand dunes, he took off his shoes and walked barefoot, leading Fang Fang, my new best smelly friend for the next few days, on a rope, who was tied to Le Le (our pack camel) and Lin Lin, whose one hump was kinda sagging because her "yin/yang has problems". Unfortunately, the first evening we were joined by a youth camp group of 15 American teenagers and a couple of annoying guys in their twenties who kept trying to impress the teachers. But they went back into town the next morning and we were left alone with Li Shifu and three camels.

Fun part about the desert - watching the sun set over the dunes, with the oasis of Dunhuang in the distance. Not so much fun - getting up at 5:30am to watch the sun rise at 6:30... Why we were woken so early I'll never know, but we were on our way by 7, to avoid the main heat. After not too long the sand became to hot for our guide to walk on, so he tied some sturdy, bright orange platic bags around his feet. These "shoes" also serve as anchors for pretty much anything, from tent to camel, when filled with sand. We also had to rest between 11:00 and 17:00, because it's just too hot.

The desert was surprisingly green - quite a lot of shrubs grow in the sand, which the camels like to chew. Those are really hard branches they bite off and chew down - just to re-chew them the whole day. Supposedly, they can go 10-20 days (depending on heat and desert condition) without food or water, but they were clearly hungry on the second day and tried to grab whatever they could when we passed by. During our siesta the camels were allowed to roam around freely and eat what they liked. They ventured off pretty far, but Li Shifu managed to get them all back. After another night in the desert we got back to his home early the next morning.

And after another hazardous taxi ride to the nearest train station with frequent trains, we're on another night train - back to Lanzhou, from where we have to switch to bus to make our way south across one of the Tibetan autonomous Prefectures, into Sichuan. It's precisely this Tibetan region which after our visit was devastated by mud-slides that killed hundreds of people... about three weeks after we passed through there.