Dunhuang

Day 319 (May 13, 2019) – Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China

We had an action-packed trip to Dunhuang. We were there for three nights, but we wished we had stayed longer. We arrived feeling exhausted after getting up at two in the morning to catch our train from Jiayuguan City. After checking into our hotel, we went out to find a strong cup of coffee and a bite to eat. Our first day in Dunhang was just an organizational day for us. We signed up for an all-day tour to the desert for next day and then bought tickets to visit the Mogao Caves for the day after that. We had to hike halfway across town to buy the tickets and it seemed like before we knew it the day was over. 

The Singing Sand Dunes tower over the city of Dunhuang.

I should start out by saying that we’re not very good tour group people. We hate feeling like we’re being carted around everywhere, we don’t like having time limits, and we hate all the waiting involved with getting the tour group members wrangled up all the time. That being said, the tour we signed up for was a bit of a necessity. The places we wanted to see were way out in the desert and there was not a good way for us to get there on our own. However, the experience of being part of a Chinese tour group was almost reason enough to go. The overwhelming majority of Chinese tourists travel by tour group rather than independently. We had seen tour groups everywhere we had been in China and always being led by a woman with a flag. We were now the only two westerners on a bus full of Chinese tourists, all led by a woman waving a stuffed animal crocodile high in the air. I felt like it was a great cultural experience for us.

We could have imagined an old kung fu movie being filmed here.

I was most excited to spend some time in the nothingness of the desert, but we had a few stops to get out of the way before we got out there. Our first stop was essentially a movie set. There was a whole village built out in the middle of nowhere which had been used in many Chinese movies. It was sort of the equivalent to an old western movie set back home. Not knowing any of the movies we didn’t find it all that interesting, but it was easy to imagine an old kung fu movie being shot there. It was also frigidly cold that early in the morning and we were happy to get out of the cold and back on the bus again.

The river and canyon near the Buddhist caves.

Our next stop was at a small series of Buddhist caves built into a cliff along a river. All the caves were decorated in elaborate paintings of various Buddhist iconographies. There was a guided tour, but it was all in Chinese, so we didn’t catch that much. A few of our fellow tour group members tried to translate some of the basics for us. I was really impressed with the location itself. There was a river running through the desert that had cut a small winding canyon. The canyon walls were more-or-less vertical, and the caves had been carved out by monks into the canyon walls. The scenery was very picturesque.

The desert near Yangguan Pass. Our matching blue camouflage neck scarves were given out to everyone on our tour. They helped with the sun, sand, and wind. 

After the caves we drove to Yangguan Pass, a fortified pass from the Han Dynasty. Many of the ancient ruins out in this part of China were from the Han Dynasty, with the Yangguan Pass dating back to around 120 BCE. What is left of the fort is little more than a square mound sitting out in the desert, but it’s amazing to think that it has been sitting there for so long.

What remains of Yangguan Pass.

We stopped for a late lunch at a small restaurant on the side of the road. I couldn’t get over how nice everyone was to us during lunch. The people from our tour group dispersed themselves inside the restaurant, all sitting at various tables. We got the menu, which was all in Chinese, but we had managed this many times before and we weren’t too concerned. But our tour group was extremely concerned for us. A couple different people came over to us to offer some help with the menu. One of the guys from our group ended up translating most of the menu for us, but in the end, he gave us some recommendations and essentially ordered our lunch for us. He picked some good options and we had a very delicious lunch.

Our our bus tour. It wasn't our intention to be wearing matching outfits that day.

Back on the bus we were driving to see Yumen Pass, another of the important passes at the edge of China’s ancient territory. What we saw was definitely the most intact of the buildings we saw that day. There was a big square building and the remains of a structure that was believed to be used for food storage. Lastly, we saw a section of the Han Great Wall. It didn’t look like much, but it was impressive for the fact that it was still around. Like most of the ruins in the area, the wall had been made from straw and mud, but it’s survived for 2,000 years just sitting out in the middle of the desert. We had seen part of the Ming Great Wall in Jiayuguan just a few days before, but that section of wall was significantly more recent (from the 1300s) than what we were seeing out here.

One of the few remaining buildings from Yumen Pass.

The Han Great Wall, which has been standing for over 2,000 years.

Not much more than straw and mud were used to construct the wall.

The largest building was believed to be a storehouse for food.

Our final stop on this whirlwind of a day was Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark. This natural park was a definite highlight of the tour. We were there for sunset which made it even more impressive. This park is located in a large depression at the intersection of the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the land has slowly eroded away leaving sections of harder rock exposed. Many of the bizarre rock formations were given names after things that they resembled. Some were aptly described while others took a bit more imagination. As the sun set, the rocks became more orange in color and stood more starkly apart from the surrounding gray-black sands. Most people were watching the sun set over the desert sand, but we preferred to look the other way and watch the rock formations slowly change color. It was really stunning.

Yardang National Geopark.

This was called peacock rock. We can see the resemblance.

Watching the rocks change color during sunset.

All of China is on the same time zone and with how far west we were sunset wasn’t until 9 PM. From the park we still had a long drive ahead of us back to town. We finally made it back to our hotel around midnight. It was a long day, but enlightening. We got to see a lot of history and plenty of desert landscape and we had a chance to talk to many of the people on our tour group. I’m still grateful for how helpful everyone was for telling us in English most things that were going on. We also learned that way more people speak English in China than we first thought. People were very shy to speak to us at first, but by the end of the trip there were a handful of people we were talking with. And for better or worse, we got to have the Chinese tour group experience. It felt a bit prescribed. At most places we visited, private cars and buses are not allowed past the park entrance so everyone must change to an official park transportation vehicle with an official park tour guide. I can’t tell you how many times we got out of our tour bus to get on an official park tour bus for an hour, to once again return to our original bus. I suppose it keeps people employed at the park and also helps to preserve the land, but it feels overly protective sometimes. We were never allowed to wander very far off on our own.

One of the many buses we rode that day.

With our first day under our belt, we had a chance to sleep in a bit the next morning but were soon in a taxi headed to see the Mogao Caves. The tickets to the caves were surprisingly expensive (we paid $76 for the tickets, which is a lot considering that our very nice hotel was only $17 a night) but they included a viewing of two thirty-minute movies explaining the history of the caves as well as a guided tour. Most people were put into tour groups of thirty or so people, but we were the only English speakers around, so Travis and I were the only two people in our group with an English-speaking tour guide, which was awesome.

The caves now look like fancy condo buildings. The concrete exterior was put up decades ago to protect them.

The original Mogao caves, before the concrete exterior went up, might have looked something like this. These were caves lived in by those constructing the main ones.

At the location of the caves, there is a massive cliff hanging at the edge of the desert’s sand dunes. Dunhuang used to be one of the key towns along the ancient Silk Road that had a lot of people from all over Asia passing through, including many Buddhists. The first caves were dug out of the cliff face around the 300s CE as a place for meditation. The inside of the caves were painted with elaborate religious art. Over time, more and more caves were created, including many by those wealthy enough to create huge caverns filled with elaborate paintings and Buddhist statues. The caves continued to be used for nearly a thousand years after their origination, which has provided an immense amount of historical information from the time period. There were believed to be as many as a thousand caves at one point, although just under 500 now remain intact. Most of the caves became buried in sand when the people traffic from the Silk Road evaporated and they were only later dug out and rediscovered. Photographs weren’t allowed in the caves, so we have nothing to show from the inside, but it was a very interesting tour and I’m glad we visited.

The Singing Sand Dunes at the edge of Dunhuang City.

Our last major activity for Dunhuang was to visit the Singing Sand Dunes. It was so hazy the first day we arrived in Dunhuang we didn’t even notice them, but when we woke up the second day it was clearer and we could see enormous sand dunes in the distance towering over the buildings at the edge of the city. These dunes come right up to the base of town and it’s surprising that the town hasn’t been engulfed by them. I have no idea what holds them back from doing so.

A long line of people ascending the dune is not what we were hoping for, but I suppose we should have expected it.

There were many opportunities to ride on a camel, but we didn't take anyone up on the offer.

I love sand dunes. I learned this on our trip to Namibia in early 2018 when we got to explore the Namib Desert. They make me feel like a kid in a sandbox and I find the curves, colors, and contrasts mesmerizing. I was pretty excited to hike around these dunes. Unfortunately, this was China and they have an annoying tendency to over commercialize and tightly control almost all tourist activities. There was a specific area of the dunes that was sectioned off where we had to walk up. It was filled with people and Chinese pop music was being blasted from speakers at the base of the dunes. Even at the top of the dune there were dune buggies running around everywhere.

We finally found a quiet spot to take in the view.

Fortunately, once we did get to the top, the roped off area disappeared and there didn’t seem to be any restrictions in place for wandering around, so we went for a long walk and finally found a place of solitude to enjoy the scenery. It was extremely windy and some of the dunes were surprisingly steep, so we were watching our steps carefully to not accidentally get blown off the trailing edge of a dune. But we got some pretty cool pictures!

We also had one of our more interesting conversations with a Chinese couple. Travis and I had just reached the top of the first dune and sat down to take in the view. We were talking to one another when a guy and his girlfriend overheard our English and came over to sit and chat with us. They were both training to be veterinarians in Lanzhou, but they were also trying to get their English-speaking certificates and wanted to practice with us. We were talking for a long time and covered all sorts of topics, but what was most memorable was their impression of the US. Their biggest concern with visiting the US was that as a foreigner they would not be able to buy a gun. I’m not kidding. They hadn’t even looked up visa requirements, but they had looked up if a foreigner can purchase a gun in the US and they were concerned to learn that they could not. They believed that the US was a very dangerous place and that most people carried guns; therefore, to remain safe on their visit they should also carry one. We tried to convince them that they should visit anyway and that a gun was certainly not necessary. Their belief may seem a bit crazy, but we did have some difficulty countering their points. Even we had to admit that we felt safer walking around China than we did at home. 

At the end of our second day, our time in Dunhuang was up. It was way too short. I would have preferred to space our activities out more and we would have liked more time to enjoy the city of Dunhuang itself. It seemed like one of the most relaxing and nicest cities we had been to in China. There were lots of interesting restaurants and tree-lined streets and plenty of space on the sidewalks to go for an uninterrupted stroll. I also would have wanted to return to the dunes a second time if given a chance. But we had a flight booked and we couldn’t change it. We were jetting back east over the Gobi Desert to the very start of the Silk Road in Xi’an.