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China Silk Road - Days 8 , 9 and 10 - Jiayuguan
10/12 – Jiayuguan
Got on the bullet train after boarding the bus from hell. (It was super crowded and clearly not at all designed for people carrying stuff. WHICH I GET. But we had to carry stuff, so it sucked.) It did eventually lurch into the train station, which has very few shops, but is otherwise quite nice. (It has a lovely reading room, children's play room, mother and baby room, a very fancy business class room, etc I couldn't find the foreigner room that ws advertised online as having lots of foreign language books, but didn't care all that much anyway...) then got into my fancy first class seat. (See last post for love of train station stuff.)
Got to the town safely, checked in, and went off to have a nice dinner at a hot pot place. It was delicious sheep + rice + all the normal hot pot stuff. Delicious!
10/13 – Jiayuguan
Today I had a bit of a run in with the staff at the hotel. The night before, they had said that, yes, they could wash our clothes (something the website said...) and there was a little plaque about it. So I asked this morning, and they said they couldn't, but said that I could get it done “dui mian” (essentially opposite the block location wise). So I hauled out my clothing there, and there was...a restaurant. I circled the block, and no luck. So I came back, rather pissed off, and asked where it was. They now were like, “Oh, we can't clean clothes...” At which point I asked them (note that this is all in Mandarin) why their signs said they could, and they'd said they could yesterday, if they couldn't today. They typed something up and said, “Oh, well, we meant dry cleaning, which is utter BS as I explicitly asked to WASH clothes, not to f'ing dry clean them. Which I told them. (Explaining that it was too expensive, not to mention that I have ordinary clothing that do not require this. And the words are quite different in Mandarin, so none of this was lost in translation nonsense.) They did their whole, “oh we can do nothing...”
So hotel is getting a bad review and I probably wasted a good 40 gallons of water washing my clothes in the sink. Enjoy your water bill, jerks.
Anyway, took the bus off to the pass, which was pretty, I guess. I mean, the fortress was...well, a very large building that had recently been rebuilt from the fortress that was there before so it was...perhaps not super exciting. They did have a rather nice museum (that weirdly seemed panned by other tourist sites) that had some very nice artifacts relating to the Great Wall dating back to the Han Dynasty, as well as some maps about it and descriptions of the area. To be fair, many were in Chinese, which might account for the negative reviews.
This is a wall of Jiayuguan. It is impressive.
Obligatory Chinese, "Get your photo with the monument and/or in costume and/or with people in costume." This is A THING.
There was a stage in which Jiayuguan had their local operas going since whatever. Why not? They were actually really good, so I can't complain.
Or if you preferred, there were a number of martial arts demos by local dudes in costume. These, I'm sure, are supposed to show off "traditional" military drills. (Since of course we know what they did 1,000 years ago...)
I mean, they are talented...it's just a bit lulzy.
What I found perhaps most interesting was how the Great Wall stretched out on either side and you could see that on one side there were lush plants and industry and on the other side was just desert. To this day, I guess, people chose the side of the pass that they would live on. It really did feel a bit like, “And on the other side of this wall there are dragons” or some such. After this, we enter the unknown. (Okay, not really. We go to other touristy towns, but still...)
Srsly...here be dragons.
There were also a bunch of people dressed up in various costumes who pretend-danced military drills and went patrolling about the fortress, which was amusing, as well as a local opera troupe (whatever the opera is called here) singing which was fun. I picked up a few carved jade glasses (the local specialty) as well as a nice book on the area, as it is very beautiful even if it's not super duper exciting.
Another amusing bit was the audio guide. It was narrated by a woman who spoke exceedingly poor English and seemed determined to flesh out what we were seeing as much as possible. An excerpt:
“Dear friend. At the fortress is a lake called nine springs lake. You may find it interesting in that it has no rivers that feed into it. That is because it is a spring. Springs have water from other places. In this spring, when it snows in the mountains, snow melts in the mountains. Then the melted snow, also called water, flows underground. It flows a long, long, way, then it arises in this spring. This is why this spring does not need rivers. The water comes from underground.
“There is often water in the spring. But sometimes there is not water in this spring. When that happens, the lake is dry. Then there is no lake. Sometimes also, there is some water in this lake. When that happens, the lake is a swamp. But other times, there is a lot of water in this lake and it is a lake.” And so on for about fifteen minutes.
Another “brilliant” segment involved the trees surrounding us and the general's desperate attempt to keep the trees alive. It went kind of like this.
“Dear friend, as you can see, there are trees around us. Some of these kinds of trees are aspens. Other types of trees are willows. Still others are different kinds of trees all together. Hundreds of years ago, a general ordered the people of Jiayuguan to plant these trees. They did and they watered these trees and these trees grew. Then the general went off to Xinjiang. The general was a very scholarly general. So when he was in Xinjiang, he wrote a poem. He sent it to the emperor. It took two years to go to the emperor. The emperor said it was very nice. It took several years for this message to reach the fortress. When the people of Jiayuguan received this message, they were very happy, so they wrote the poem in stone. Do you want to hear it?
“I traveled far from home. It was a long and sad trip over many mountains. Then I came back and wanted to see the beauty of home. But home was no longer there and the beauty was less. So I planted trees.
“It is a beautiful poem, isn't it? The poem was written after the general returned. But while the general was gone, the people of Jiayuguan did not water these trees, so these trees died. All of the trees had died. So when the general returned, he ordered that the people plant more trees. They planted trees and watered the trees, so the trees grew. Then people died donk-keys to these trees. The donk-keys g-nawed on the trees, so they died too. So the general ordered that the people plant more trees. These trees were watered and no one tied donk-keys to these trees, so these trees grew. These trees are the ancestors of the trees you see here.”
And on and on and on. I turned it off not long into the narration, missing exciting stories like, “moving bricks over ice” and “goats help to move bricks”. I'm not sure I missed much.
Some cool latice work that undoubtedly took up an hour of audioguide time.
If you want to ride a camel, someone will supply a camel for you to ride! (This is a constant on this trip!)
One side of the wall is industry and irrigation. The other is scrub. This is the tale of western China. (Note that we're still in the "verdant" part. Eventually the scrub goes to no plants at all.)
Jiayuguan truly does hold a great strategic position. If you want to get into China proper, you have to cross a desert then go through this pass. There isn't another way (aside from scaling those peaks). It's naturally super strategic.
Yeah, so China had a pony express before the pony express was even an idea. The guy here is from like 0 AD and holding some messages that he passed by relay.
This is as good a dioroma of the silk road as any...
One of the messages the pony express guy was conveying. They're useful, but still, WHY NOT PAPER? (Probably it didn't exist yet, so eh...)
A unicorn. Like, even not so important museums in China are filled with cool 1,000 year old stuff. Which is pretty epic, y'know? (This was all titled in Mandarin, but I can mostly read the dynasties so can mostly place it timewise. Mostly...)
Anyway, after doing the Jiayuguan stuff, we wandered around town. Mostly we bemused everyone, but fortunately the OLD MEN DOING CHESS are really into chess so ignored us. Like, chess is serious business here. SERIOUS.
We got back fairly early and went wandering around the town. I guess white people are rare here as almost every child stared at us with slack jawed fear. The other visitors seemed quite amused by us, too, with one group of women yelling, “hello!” at us again and again until we waved back and said, “hello!” in response.
We checked out a local super market (yay for food!!!! I am totally eating my apples even if they make me sick. I will wash carefully then devour!!!) and then to a local noodle joint that was hearty and delicious. Yay!
10/13 – Jiayuguan
We woke up early in the morning and made it out to the Weijin murals. These are a series of tombs (about a thousand, of which 14 have been excavated) from 200-400 AD which are covered in perfectly preserved pictures of normal daily life. (i.e. people butchering pigs, plowing fields, farming mulberries, dogs wagging tails, etc.) They're so gorgeous that they're often described as “Underground Art Galleries”, which is well deserved. They also have lovely carved tiles of dragons, a weird mask looking thing, and intricate geometric patterns that look remarkably like Celtic knots. A guard followed us down to make sure that we didn't touch anything,which seemed like a wise idea, but otherwise we had the place to ourselves.
Weijin tiles. If these do nothing for you, you have no soul.
There is only one tomb open to tourists, which we crawled inside after descending a long staircase. It was absolutely gorgeous and covered in perfectly preserved paintings, just like the pictures. Then we got out and went to the small museum accompanying the tombs that had a reconstructed tomb as well as some other artifacts from the other tomb. It was quite amusing.
Such pretty art!
The recreation is fantabulous!
Could I be buried this way?
We were done by quite early in the morning, at which we tired to figure out what to do. We went to the local Xinhua bookstore and browsed around. Of particular amusement were the learning English books, that were in the same awful Chinglish as all the signs here. Well...that explains quite a bit, I guess. No wonder the poor audio guides are incomprehensible.
From there, we took a bus out to the fortress mostly by accident (we saw a gate nearby that looked interesting, but the stop didn't seem to be there...) Then we found a taxi driver who took us to the overhanging wall and the 1st beacon. The overhanging wall was clearly obviously reconstructed, but it was a nice hike up to the top (if rather strenuous – perhaps a half mile of stairs). But at the top was a tower and then an amazing vista of the Gobi desert stretching out nearly infinitely in the opposite direction. It really did feel like the end of the world and gave a sense as to what it must have felt like being exiled from China back in the past.
The first beacon was perhaps slightly less exciting as it was just a large mount of dirt and brick. It was by a very lovely river, though, as well as a bit of a museum that told the story (yet again) of the Great Wall.
Hike along the overhanging wall.
The full overhanging wall hike. It's pretty easy, but scenic.
Locks at the top for no explicit reason.
Me by sculptures depicting the silk road at the base because why not.
River by first fire tower.
We returned and went shopping for the train ride the next day. Among other amusing things was Cherry Coke (official) with a picture of Bernie Sanders on it (I kid you not...), camel and yak jerky, and all kinds of wine with weird names (“Romance”, “Boy Girl”, or some such. Very odd ball...) I did get a bottle of pomegranate wine, which was quite tasty (rather sweet, but otherwise tasted like pomegranate with a bit of a kick). Then we turned in early.
Bernie Sanders cola? Why not?
Yak and Camel jerky fulfills all your exotic meat needs. (I also bought elk from the Sacred Mother of the West's lake, since that seems peak Chinese. If you have a sacred elk, clearly you EAT IT.)
All wine is romantic, but not all is ROMANCE WINE.
Ladybro wine is tailored to..honestly, I'm not sure what the demographic is...
Got on the bullet train after boarding the bus from hell. (It was super crowded and clearly not at all designed for people carrying stuff. WHICH I GET. But we had to carry stuff, so it sucked.) It did eventually lurch into the train station, which has very few shops, but is otherwise quite nice. (It has a lovely reading room, children's play room, mother and baby room, a very fancy business class room, etc I couldn't find the foreigner room that ws advertised online as having lots of foreign language books, but didn't care all that much anyway...) then got into my fancy first class seat. (See last post for love of train station stuff.)
Got to the town safely, checked in, and went off to have a nice dinner at a hot pot place. It was delicious sheep + rice + all the normal hot pot stuff. Delicious!
10/13 – Jiayuguan
Today I had a bit of a run in with the staff at the hotel. The night before, they had said that, yes, they could wash our clothes (something the website said...) and there was a little plaque about it. So I asked this morning, and they said they couldn't, but said that I could get it done “dui mian” (essentially opposite the block location wise). So I hauled out my clothing there, and there was...a restaurant. I circled the block, and no luck. So I came back, rather pissed off, and asked where it was. They now were like, “Oh, we can't clean clothes...” At which point I asked them (note that this is all in Mandarin) why their signs said they could, and they'd said they could yesterday, if they couldn't today. They typed something up and said, “Oh, well, we meant dry cleaning, which is utter BS as I explicitly asked to WASH clothes, not to f'ing dry clean them. Which I told them. (Explaining that it was too expensive, not to mention that I have ordinary clothing that do not require this. And the words are quite different in Mandarin, so none of this was lost in translation nonsense.) They did their whole, “oh we can do nothing...”
So hotel is getting a bad review and I probably wasted a good 40 gallons of water washing my clothes in the sink. Enjoy your water bill, jerks.
Anyway, took the bus off to the pass, which was pretty, I guess. I mean, the fortress was...well, a very large building that had recently been rebuilt from the fortress that was there before so it was...perhaps not super exciting. They did have a rather nice museum (that weirdly seemed panned by other tourist sites) that had some very nice artifacts relating to the Great Wall dating back to the Han Dynasty, as well as some maps about it and descriptions of the area. To be fair, many were in Chinese, which might account for the negative reviews.
This is a wall of Jiayuguan. It is impressive.
Obligatory Chinese, "Get your photo with the monument and/or in costume and/or with people in costume." This is A THING.
There was a stage in which Jiayuguan had their local operas going since whatever. Why not? They were actually really good, so I can't complain.
Or if you preferred, there were a number of martial arts demos by local dudes in costume. These, I'm sure, are supposed to show off "traditional" military drills. (Since of course we know what they did 1,000 years ago...)
I mean, they are talented...it's just a bit lulzy.
What I found perhaps most interesting was how the Great Wall stretched out on either side and you could see that on one side there were lush plants and industry and on the other side was just desert. To this day, I guess, people chose the side of the pass that they would live on. It really did feel a bit like, “And on the other side of this wall there are dragons” or some such. After this, we enter the unknown. (Okay, not really. We go to other touristy towns, but still...)
Srsly...here be dragons.
There were also a bunch of people dressed up in various costumes who pretend-danced military drills and went patrolling about the fortress, which was amusing, as well as a local opera troupe (whatever the opera is called here) singing which was fun. I picked up a few carved jade glasses (the local specialty) as well as a nice book on the area, as it is very beautiful even if it's not super duper exciting.
Another amusing bit was the audio guide. It was narrated by a woman who spoke exceedingly poor English and seemed determined to flesh out what we were seeing as much as possible. An excerpt:
“Dear friend. At the fortress is a lake called nine springs lake. You may find it interesting in that it has no rivers that feed into it. That is because it is a spring. Springs have water from other places. In this spring, when it snows in the mountains, snow melts in the mountains. Then the melted snow, also called water, flows underground. It flows a long, long, way, then it arises in this spring. This is why this spring does not need rivers. The water comes from underground.
“There is often water in the spring. But sometimes there is not water in this spring. When that happens, the lake is dry. Then there is no lake. Sometimes also, there is some water in this lake. When that happens, the lake is a swamp. But other times, there is a lot of water in this lake and it is a lake.” And so on for about fifteen minutes.
Another “brilliant” segment involved the trees surrounding us and the general's desperate attempt to keep the trees alive. It went kind of like this.
“Dear friend, as you can see, there are trees around us. Some of these kinds of trees are aspens. Other types of trees are willows. Still others are different kinds of trees all together. Hundreds of years ago, a general ordered the people of Jiayuguan to plant these trees. They did and they watered these trees and these trees grew. Then the general went off to Xinjiang. The general was a very scholarly general. So when he was in Xinjiang, he wrote a poem. He sent it to the emperor. It took two years to go to the emperor. The emperor said it was very nice. It took several years for this message to reach the fortress. When the people of Jiayuguan received this message, they were very happy, so they wrote the poem in stone. Do you want to hear it?
“I traveled far from home. It was a long and sad trip over many mountains. Then I came back and wanted to see the beauty of home. But home was no longer there and the beauty was less. So I planted trees.
“It is a beautiful poem, isn't it? The poem was written after the general returned. But while the general was gone, the people of Jiayuguan did not water these trees, so these trees died. All of the trees had died. So when the general returned, he ordered that the people plant more trees. They planted trees and watered the trees, so the trees grew. Then people died donk-keys to these trees. The donk-keys g-nawed on the trees, so they died too. So the general ordered that the people plant more trees. These trees were watered and no one tied donk-keys to these trees, so these trees grew. These trees are the ancestors of the trees you see here.”
And on and on and on. I turned it off not long into the narration, missing exciting stories like, “moving bricks over ice” and “goats help to move bricks”. I'm not sure I missed much.
Some cool latice work that undoubtedly took up an hour of audioguide time.
If you want to ride a camel, someone will supply a camel for you to ride! (This is a constant on this trip!)
One side of the wall is industry and irrigation. The other is scrub. This is the tale of western China. (Note that we're still in the "verdant" part. Eventually the scrub goes to no plants at all.)
Jiayuguan truly does hold a great strategic position. If you want to get into China proper, you have to cross a desert then go through this pass. There isn't another way (aside from scaling those peaks). It's naturally super strategic.
Yeah, so China had a pony express before the pony express was even an idea. The guy here is from like 0 AD and holding some messages that he passed by relay.
This is as good a dioroma of the silk road as any...
One of the messages the pony express guy was conveying. They're useful, but still, WHY NOT PAPER? (Probably it didn't exist yet, so eh...)
A unicorn. Like, even not so important museums in China are filled with cool 1,000 year old stuff. Which is pretty epic, y'know? (This was all titled in Mandarin, but I can mostly read the dynasties so can mostly place it timewise. Mostly...)
Anyway, after doing the Jiayuguan stuff, we wandered around town. Mostly we bemused everyone, but fortunately the OLD MEN DOING CHESS are really into chess so ignored us. Like, chess is serious business here. SERIOUS.
We got back fairly early and went wandering around the town. I guess white people are rare here as almost every child stared at us with slack jawed fear. The other visitors seemed quite amused by us, too, with one group of women yelling, “hello!” at us again and again until we waved back and said, “hello!” in response.
We checked out a local super market (yay for food!!!! I am totally eating my apples even if they make me sick. I will wash carefully then devour!!!) and then to a local noodle joint that was hearty and delicious. Yay!
10/13 – Jiayuguan
We woke up early in the morning and made it out to the Weijin murals. These are a series of tombs (about a thousand, of which 14 have been excavated) from 200-400 AD which are covered in perfectly preserved pictures of normal daily life. (i.e. people butchering pigs, plowing fields, farming mulberries, dogs wagging tails, etc.) They're so gorgeous that they're often described as “Underground Art Galleries”, which is well deserved. They also have lovely carved tiles of dragons, a weird mask looking thing, and intricate geometric patterns that look remarkably like Celtic knots. A guard followed us down to make sure that we didn't touch anything,which seemed like a wise idea, but otherwise we had the place to ourselves.
Weijin tiles. If these do nothing for you, you have no soul.
There is only one tomb open to tourists, which we crawled inside after descending a long staircase. It was absolutely gorgeous and covered in perfectly preserved paintings, just like the pictures. Then we got out and went to the small museum accompanying the tombs that had a reconstructed tomb as well as some other artifacts from the other tomb. It was quite amusing.
Such pretty art!
The recreation is fantabulous!
Could I be buried this way?
We were done by quite early in the morning, at which we tired to figure out what to do. We went to the local Xinhua bookstore and browsed around. Of particular amusement were the learning English books, that were in the same awful Chinglish as all the signs here. Well...that explains quite a bit, I guess. No wonder the poor audio guides are incomprehensible.
From there, we took a bus out to the fortress mostly by accident (we saw a gate nearby that looked interesting, but the stop didn't seem to be there...) Then we found a taxi driver who took us to the overhanging wall and the 1st beacon. The overhanging wall was clearly obviously reconstructed, but it was a nice hike up to the top (if rather strenuous – perhaps a half mile of stairs). But at the top was a tower and then an amazing vista of the Gobi desert stretching out nearly infinitely in the opposite direction. It really did feel like the end of the world and gave a sense as to what it must have felt like being exiled from China back in the past.
The first beacon was perhaps slightly less exciting as it was just a large mount of dirt and brick. It was by a very lovely river, though, as well as a bit of a museum that told the story (yet again) of the Great Wall.
Hike along the overhanging wall.
The full overhanging wall hike. It's pretty easy, but scenic.
Locks at the top for no explicit reason.
Me by sculptures depicting the silk road at the base because why not.
River by first fire tower.
We returned and went shopping for the train ride the next day. Among other amusing things was Cherry Coke (official) with a picture of Bernie Sanders on it (I kid you not...), camel and yak jerky, and all kinds of wine with weird names (“Romance”, “Boy Girl”, or some such. Very odd ball...) I did get a bottle of pomegranate wine, which was quite tasty (rather sweet, but otherwise tasted like pomegranate with a bit of a kick). Then we turned in early.
Bernie Sanders cola? Why not?
Yak and Camel jerky fulfills all your exotic meat needs. (I also bought elk from the Sacred Mother of the West's lake, since that seems peak Chinese. If you have a sacred elk, clearly you EAT IT.)
All wine is romantic, but not all is ROMANCE WINE.
Ladybro wine is tailored to..honestly, I'm not sure what the demographic is...