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All three of us liked Dunhuang from the first. It was clean, quiet and sunny all the time we were there, with none of the big ugly tower blocks we're used to and the feel of being a town rather than a city. The streets were empty when we arrived, even though it was about 8am. We went straight to our hostel, took advantage of the receptionist's foolish offer to help us bring our bags up the three flights of stairs, then collapsed in our room and slept away the rest of the morning.
Dunhuang is most famous as the location of the Mogao caves, which were developed from simple places of meditation into a huge network of elaborately painted and decorated Buddhist shrines through a period of roughly 1000 years. At the beginning of the 20th century, a previously hidden cave was discovered, containing as many as 50,000 ancient manuscripts - considered to be one of the greatest treasure troves of ancient documents ever found. However, the bigger motivation for us in coming to Dunhuang was the opportunity to take a camel trek into the desert and spend a night under the stars there. This was what we spent our first afternoon arranging - that and browsing and haggling in a near-deserted jewellery market we stumbled upon.
Early that evening, we headed to the cafe through which we'd organised our camel trek. Here, we met the four other travellers who'd be accompanying us, two of whom were volunteers living in China with Latitude, another gap year company. Then, the seven of us piled into cars to be driven to the outskirts of the Gobi desert. The outskirts were very underwhelming: just some flat dusty ground that could have been sand or dirt, with plenty of greenery dotted about. We were introduced to our guide, a tiny old man who spoke no English but sang old Chinese folk songs to himself loudly and cheerfully for the duration of the evening, and our camels. Our camels were less spitty and gross than I'd expected (good) but also less hump-y (bad). My camel, Edgar (unsurprisingly not his actual name. Hannah named him) had two little humps so floppy that they'd each slumped over to one side. All of the camels were connected by a thin rope attached to pegs in their noses. This proved to be a bit of an issue for Edgar, who was definitely the slacker of the group and would be yanked sharply forward by the nostrils every time he lagged too far behind, giving a scary screaming snort each time. Even scarier was just sitting on the camels whilst they stood up then sat down again; they don't really lower themselves, just bend their ankles and drop straight onto their knees, which sends you lurching violently forwards. Camels are just generally not idea as an animal to ride. The humps are an issue in themselves (even humps as puny as our camels'); we all had backpacks which bounced up and down, smacking our camels in the humps as we went along. Then, they have really wiry hair which chafes horribly against your ankles and, if, like us, you optimistically wore shorts to make the most of the tanning opportunities of time in the desert, legs. I had an ankle rash for nearly a week after our camel trekking experience! You don't really mind any of these things at first - it just feels cool to be riding a camel through the desert, and the novelty of it distracts you from everything else, but after a couple of hours that does change...
It was maybe 3 hours camel-walk from where we began to where we set up camp for the night. For the first hour of this, we were riding across relatively flat land and amidst both old and new desert cemeteries. The graves here consisted of shallow domes made of pale earthen bricks, almost like cairns, sometimes marked with skinny grave-stones, sometimes left bare. Some of the graves were alone, others were grouped together within areas marked out with small stones. The whole time, we were moving closer and closer to the dunes on the horizon. When we did reach them, we wound through a few of the smaller dunes until the flat (boring) land behind us was hidden. It was at about this point, when the sand was suddenly much thicker, that Cat's phone, the only phone remaining between the three of us and our only means of contact with anyone else in China, slipped out of her pocket. I saw it happen and shouted for everyone to stop, but even so it took the guide minutes and minutes of pacing up and down, sifting through the sand before the phone was recovered. Not much further, we dismounted and set up camp in a hollow set between several large dunes. A large-ish group of Chinese tourists arrived with a different guide at the same time and immediately charged up the dunes, screaming, with several wooden sledges. We followed, more slowly, a little later. Climbing the dunes was exhausting, and dragging a sledge up with you was infuriating. We were determined to reach the top of the highest local dune in time to watch the sunset though, so struggled on without breaks - on our hands and knees when necessary. By the time the sun came to set, we were all sat in a long line along the ridge of the tallest dune. The sand and the sky blazed up all around us at the same time, then slowly the shadows on the dunes darkened, the sky faded, the moon came into view and we threw ourselves back down the dunes on our little sledges. This was less exciting than we'd hoped: cracks between the boards of the sledges meant they filled with sand and you had to bum-shuffle furiously to make progress down the dune. Alternative techniques included standing in the sledges and trying to surf down the dunes, or giving up and just sprinting back down.
Our dinner was instant noodles and 'mystery sausage' (a sausage-shaped tube of unidentifiable processed meat that tastes better than it should), eaten by the light of a torch hung from a stick. After this, we all scrambled a little way back up the dunes and lay in the sand together to talk and swap stories. The two Latitude volunteers were, I think, the only other foreigners we'd met in the whole year who were our age, let alone in a similar situation to ours*, so talking to them was especially interesting for us. That night, because it was so warm and so nice just to be outside, we pulled our sleeping bags out of our tents and slept under the stars, which was just brilliant. It was less brilliant the next morning, when the temperature had dropped and we were harrassed out of our nice warm sleeping bags and forced back onto our awkward, uncomfortable camels, to walk away from the cool, attractive part of the desert and back towards the boring outskirts-y part. My poor chafed ankles were in so much pain for this bit! I would sit with my legs sticking out from Edgar's sides like a complete idiot just to give them some respite from the constant scratching, and yes, I was probably being over-dramatic but it did hurt.
Back in Dunhuang, we treated ourselves to chocolate pancakes at the cafe that had organised our expedition and added our entries (and warnings vis a vis chafing problems) to their reviews books. We would have liked to retreat back to our hostel to sleep some more, but we still had several important train tickets to sort out. Sorting these out quickly became pretty hellish. The ticket office at the station couldn't sell them to us, but we were told that several local hotels might be able to get hold of them for us, so we had to run from hotel to hotel, struggling through all the explanations and details with each one before being sent on with nothing to the next... for a time, it looked like we simply wouldn't be able to get to Kashgar, which had been the focus of all our journeying north. All our hopes were pinned on the last major hotel in town. Cat and I flung ourselves onto a sofa in the lobby whilst we waited to hear if the hotel could help us, miserable and feeling sorry for ourselves. In the end, we did get the tickets - but after hours of struggling and being so much more expensive than we'd expected, this didn't improve our mood much. We stormed down the streets back to the hostel, shouting and swearing and holding things out for each other to kick.
After all of this, we still had one more thing we had to see in Dunhuang - the Mogao caves. Unfortunately, the entrance ticket was extortionate and they refused to accept our student cards so we were unable to get our usual 50% discount. So... you can probably guess what's coming... we didn't go. I can hardly believe we didn't go into the caves, and I don't know if I can justify it either. All I can say is that we were exhausted, very aware of the strain on our budgets and too grumpy to think that the caves might be worth the expense. Instead, we grumbled off to explore the (free) museum outside the caves and make fun of everything possible. (The museum was actually very good, but we were more in the mood for mocking than learning, so we might have missed the point slightly.) On the plus side, dinner, our last meal in Dunhuang, was great... barbecued broccoli, dozens of meat skewers and possibly the best dumplings I've had in China, from the outdoor food market.
I feel like I've moaned quite a lot in this blog entry, so hopefully I've not given the wrong impression of Dunhuang. I promise I did really like it!
*Cat and I did meet an English guy our age, who was teaching in the city, outside a club and in the early hours of the morning in Chengdu. As soon as he learnt we were all the same age though, he was only interested in asking us what grades we'd got in our A-levels, and therefore we have decided that he doesn't count.
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Jim Brilliant. Just great. You've achieved an ambition I've had for a long while.