ThisIsVlad

My next and final stop was Chengdu, capitol of Sichuan province. Sichuan is a province more or less in the middle of China and is most known for pandas and for amazing food. I’m not gonna lie, one of the reasons i chose this place was because of the food. Sichuan cuisine is one of China’s 8 major styles and is extremely popular all across China (and globally… i’m sure you’ve seen dishes/restaurants back home labeled Sichuan or Szechuan). It’s one of the most prevalent styles of Chinese food back home, but of course, the food back home is totally Americanized and often times barely resembles the real thing. Since Sichuan cuisine is so popular in China, i’ve seen it everywhere along my trip, but have actively avoided it because i wanted to save it for when i got to Sichuan province.

The capitol of Sichuan, Chengdu, is a super cool city. It is not one of China’s biggest most major cities, and is more like a second tier town, yet the population in China is so massive that even not being one of the biggest cities, it still has *14 million* people. Despite being that big, this place has a really relaxed chill vibe.. In fact, it’s actually know for having a relaxed pace of life and for the people here taking it easy and really enjoying life. Actually, before i even read that, i could just *feel* it here, which is kind of surprising as i dont speak the language, and dont know what i am basing it on, but i could just tell. I really enjoyed my time in this town.

After the last couple days of crazy trains and other issues, i arrived at my hostel completely exhausted. To my surprise, they had a large fridge stocked with great beers from all over the world. I got a Delirium Nocturnum right away. Ever since i left Beijing, i had been on the move quite a bit, moving from city to city almost every day, and going to see sites all the time. After all that, it sounded really nice to stay put for a while. Not only that, but i made *zero* plans for the next two days. No excursions. No destinations out of town. Nothing. I was just going to spend two straight days just being lazy, wandering about, and eating. That sounded amazing.

After a quick nap, i went out to get my first taste of Sichuan food here. Sichuan food is known for MaLa, a combination of fiery chilis and Sichuan peppercorns (a special type of peppercorn with a super unique taste that gives your mouth a sensation of being numb). Back home, the food is not nearly as spicy as it is here and pretty much every restaurant omits the Sichuan peppercorns altogether 😭. I got two classic dishes: Mapo Tofu (which translates to something like “pockmarked grandmother’s tofu”) and Gong Bao Ji (called Kung Pao back home). I gotta say, the Sichuan peppercorns really make a huge difference. The taste is just so different without them. The Mapo tofu was spicier here than back home and had an incredible flavor and texture. The Gong Bao was surprisingly not very spicy actually, and the sauce actually had a mild sweetness to it. Both dishes were great! I’m going to eat well here 🙂.

Sadly, based on my schedule, i couldn’t stay in Turpan very long. In fact, i could only stay one day… not even overnight. I really was loving this town though, and i decided to try to cut a day from my next stop so i could stay here one day. I called the airline and surprisingly they said it was no problem at all, i just had to pay the $25 fare difference. Unfortunately though, if i wanted to pay with an international card, they would need to send me a form, have me print it, then sign it, and then send it back to them. Um. Whaaa? That clearly wasn’t an option. They said i could use a Chinese credit card, but clearly i dont own one of those. I went out to ask the hostel people if they could put it on a card of theirs and i could give them cash. But, none of them had a credit card… they only use WeChat. Dammit. So, i wasn’t able to change my plan after-all.

And my plan was a horrible one. I would need to (after already getting a shite night of sleep the night before on the train) take a taxi an hour back to the train station, then take the 12:30am train out to this random city called Hami which was only a 5 hour train ride, not giving me much time to sleep, and then wait around for 5 hours until my 10:30 am flight. Fun!! But what can you do?

Our awesome taxi driver picked me up and we drove to the station. He was bumping music super loud and his taxi had lights that flashed in time to the bass. As we drove through the darkness, little field mice would scurry across the road in front of us. It was one of those wonderful and surreal travel moments. Eventually he stammered out with a struggle, the only English words i had heard him say ever, “I like music”.

We got to the security checkpoint. It’s pitch black. There is a storm brewing and the wind is howling like crazy. Here are the guards with the crazy assault rifles. We are asked to get out. The wind is blowing so hard that i am almost being knocked over. I’m called inside. They fiddle with my passport. It didnt feel like such a big deal earlier when it was daylight, nice weather, and the Taiwanese woman was with me… but being back at this checkpoint, alone, at night, in this storm, with all the guns… it was really starting to creep me the fuck out. I stood there nervously as the guy spent what seemed like ages entering my passport data into a computer. I was incredibly glad/relieved when i was waved to go back to the taxi.

We get to the train station . There is a search, metal detector, and xray. Then there is another one. Then there is a third one to get into the ticketing area. They are not happy with the xray. I have to open my luggage and they look through my toiletries. They seem concerned by the spray-on sunblock, the insect repellant, and the shaving cream. They look confused and talk back and forth rapidly, but of course i understand nothing as always. I pantomime mosquitos flying around and biting me and me spraying them. I pantomime the hot sun burning me. I pantomime myself shaving. The guards seem placated and let me pass. I buy my tickets and then there is yet another (4th!) round of inspections to get to the waiting room. During each inspection, they make me take a big swig of my water so they know it’s not explosives or something. By the end, my water is almost empty.

I finally board my train. After only 4 hours of sleep, i get woken up by the train attendant. I reach for my phone. Um. Where is my phone? Oh god. I feel around everywhere… my pockets, my bed, my day pack. I feel all the cracks between the bed and the wall. I turn the blankets and pillow upside down. No phone. I do those things again and again. No phone. I am *freaking out* at this point. Not only would replacing a phone be expensive as hell, but I literally could not survive here with no phone. My flight confirmation is in there. I cant translate anything without it, or buy train tickets, etc etc . I’m getting frantic now. And my stop is hella soon. What am i going to do if we reach the stop and I haven’t found it? Finally i leap out of bed and there it is. It had fallen 9 feet down from my top bunk to the floor below. I felt so relieved.

We get into Hami at 5:30 am. I order a DiDi to the airport. We start driving, and the driver texts me through the app (it automatically translates back and forth which is amazing). The airport is not open yet. It doesnt open until 8am. Oh great. I ask if there is anywhere nearby that i can wait. No, it’s in the Gobi desert and there is nothing. Shit. He asks if he should take me to breakfast and i say yes. It’s still dark out, and basically everything is still closed, but he finds a tiny little hole in the wall dumpling spot.

We go inside. I order some dumplings. While i wait, i notice a “health inspection” card for the restaurant (they have those here??). This place gets a C, the lowest grade. I look down and i see a cockroach frantically trying to unsuccessfully climb out of a trashcan. I look at my dumplings. They looked yummy just a minute ago, but now I am grossed out and slowly force myself to choke them down. The driver leaves and i still have a ton of time to kill. I hang out and read my book for the next 2 hours, with people coming in and out of the restaurant looking at me weird, wondering what the hell this white guy is doing in Hami at all, and why he is reading a book in this tiny hole in the wall shop. Finally, it’s time, and i get up to go. The owner smiles ands waves me goodbye.

Finally i get to the airport and catch my flight. Oh man. I am *exhausted*. My tiny excursion into Xinjiang was fascinating and i’m really glad i did it. This is definitely the crazy traveling that you end up always remembering and looking back on. But damn… i really had to work for it.

The province to the west of Gansu is Xinjiang. If Gansu was a little off the beaten track, Xinjiang is completely off the charts. It’s the western-most province and borders Central Asia, Pakistan, etc. Even though it is one of the largest provinces in China, it wasnt even in my guidebook at all. Similar to Tibet, Xinjiang is a pretty contested region. Only half of the population here is ethnically Chinese, and most of the other people here are Uygurs (a Muslim Turkic ethnic group). China took over this area in the 18th century and unsurprisingly, the Uygurs are not too happy about that. There have been a series of uprisings by the Uygurs, after which China has steadily cracked down on the region more and more.

Reading the news, things here are pretty horrific. Because of fear of muslim extremism and separatism, China has been ruling this area with an iron fist. People here are sent to “re-education camps” so they can be taught to fall in line w/ China’s thinking. Some say that there are tens of thousands of people in these camps, while other estimates say it’s close to a million. People say that there is torture and other horrible things happening in these camps, but nobody knows for sure. The Chinese government claims that all of this is overstated, and that the people in these camps are “treated well” and fed well and that they are absolutely free to leave… well, once they finish their re-education and are “fixed”… and if they dont get fixed… well, they need to stay a little longer. I read that the government actually gives out cards to the Uygurs and the cards state whether this person is good, bad, or neutral and based on your card, you are not allowed to go into certain shops or areas depending on your rating. The government is tearing down Mosques. It’s all truly incredibly disturbing.

Because of all this, things are tense here. Most Chinese people who don’t live here stay clear of this area altogether.

I took a night train to the city of Turpan. In the morning i woke up and groggily looked out the window. The scenery outside looked like Mars. Scraggly lunar rocks everywhere. Completely desolate. It was straight up eerie outside. When i arrived at the station, there was an altercation between the women working the metal detectors on the way out of the station and some guy. I have no idea what it was about but they were screaming at him at the top of their lungs and totally going nuts. No idea if this had anything to do w/ “the situation” here or not. He leaves the station and then the women go running out and yell to a police officer. The police officer calls the guy back, screams at him, and then slaps the guy upside the face several times super hard. He then grabs him by the collar and drags him off somewhere. What.the.fuck.

As i’m looking for a cab to get into town, i meet a woman named Cola from Taiwan who *gasp* speaks English and we share a cab together into town. There is a checkpoint on the way into town. Police with bullet proof vests and massive scary looking assault rifles check our documents. They search the taxi. We are allowed to proceed. When we get into town, the woman and i decide to meet up later to go explore the ruins. In the meantime, I check into a hostel for a much needed shower. It’s really hot here (the hottest place in China, their equivalent of Death Valley, is nearby and temps there can reach 140 degrees!!).

Afterwards I go wandering around town. This town is super fascinating. It really does not feel like I’m in China anymore at all. It seems like Central Asia. Everything here is so much more ramshackle than any place i’ve been on this trip. Run down buildings, boarded up factories, old people pulling random carts, dusty roads. This is kind of much more what i imagined the Silk Road to be like. It all just felt *so* different!

That being said, you definitely see signs of all the conflict here. There is a heavy police presence. It seems like there is some kind of police booth on every block with armed cops standing outside. Our hostel has riot shields and helmets stacked up inside the doorway and there are security cameras outside. Actually, a lot of the restaurants here have riot gear inside as well. I dont know if people here are literally preparing for civil war or what. Going to visit the old bazaar requires a thorough search, metal detectors, and an xray of your bags.

I find a restaurant to get some food. Everyone is going about their business, cheerfully eating and drinking. If it wasn’t for the riot gear at the entrance, you could almost forget that there are any problems here. I order rice pilaf and this baked bun with a meat filling called a Samsa, both of which are Uygur specialties. I’ve never been excited by rice pilaf, and now is no different, but the Samsa is good.

I wander around a little more. I really feel like i could wander around here for days. Eventually, i go to meet up with Cola and I bring along this Dutch guy who i met on the lonely planet forums. Our same taxi driver from this morning (super friendly smiley guy) picks us up and we are off to go sightseeing. First stop is to go see the Karez wells. The people of this area were able to build this ingenious series of wells and canals for irrigation and drinking. Without this crazy feat there is no way peole could have lived in this hot area.

Afterwards, we set off to go see the Jiaohe Ruins. These ruins from 2,000 years ago are called the world’s largest, oldest, and best preserved ancient ruined city. To be honest, i had kind of not really been that excited to go see these old ruins, though i am not 100% sure why. But, when we got there it was actually really cool. The area of the ruins was *huge*… a whole entire old city. As we walked, every time that i thought this would be the end of the ruins, we would turn the corner and there would be more ruins. The sheer vastness of it was super impressive… It’s over 1.5 km in length!

This area is also known for its grapes and wine. Our taxi driver has a friend who is in the grape business, so when he picked us up, he brought each of us a giant thing of grapes to try.

Afterwards, we went to get some dinner. There is a famous Uygur dish that i have been wanting to try for ages, and it’s called simply “Big Plate Chicken”. They chop up a whole chicken, bones and all, and mix it with a ton of chilis, spices, and a tasty sauce with noodles and potatoes underneath. When they brought it out, they really weren’t lying about it being a big plate… it was huge! You can see the dutch guy’s head for size comparison. I’m pretty good with chopsticks, but eating this was a bit tricky. The noodles were super slippery and we’re hard to pull out from under the chicken. Also trying to eat chicken on the bone with chopsticks was tough as well.

We all parted ways, and it really struck me all of a sudden how easy this day was. Since Cola spoke english and Mandarin, she was able to do everything for us. Buying tickets, getting directions, ordering food, calling the taxi driver and arranging multiple destinations throughout the day… all of it was a breeze. Its kind of crazy just how much of a difference it made.

Other than the dunes, the other thing to see in Dunhuang is the Mogao Grottos. Since this town was on the Silk Road route from India, it was heavily influenced by Buddhism pretty early on. Around the 5th century, artists here stated carving grottos in the sand stone and painting Buddhist art on the walls. A lot of it is super well preserved. There are hundreds of these grottos, but in the tour you only get to see 10 of them so that people arent trampling through all the grottos everyday. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take photos inside the grottos so I don’t have any photos to show (I only took photos of the outside). The painting and statues were super impressive though.

One interesting story about the grottos. In the late 11th century, the monks that were living here had to abandon the area, so they put a ton of old manuscripts etc inside one small cave, sealed the wall, and drew a painting over it to conceal it. The monks never came back. 800 years later, some dude is in there sweeping out sand and when he bumps a wall, he notices a crack in it. They open this crack and find *50,000* priceless documents from centuries ago including the world’s earliest printed book. How insane is that?! I mean, that is like something you’d see in a Indiana Jones movie and roll your eyes because it seems so unreal and ludicrous. Sadly, when the guy went to tell the local government, they didn’t really understand the value of this stuff and didn’t care. So, the British and other international archeologists swooped in and bought 40k out of 50k manuscripts for next to nothing.

On the way back to town, my taxi needed to get gas. Oddly, he makes me get out of the car and stand outside of the gas station on the side of the road. Huh? Why can’t i sit in the car while he gets gas? Why cant i even be *near* the car? No clue, but this happened to me all 3 times that i was in a taxi that got gas.

The fanciest hotel here is on the outskirts of town and they have a rooftop restaurant where you can chill and look at the dunes just outside of town. It really was a *fantastic* view! Unfortunately, when i had come here earlier it was closed for the afternoon. I had been craving Western food all day and had really been looking forward to getting something other than Chinese food for the first time this trip. Dont get me wrong… the food has been really good, I just dont feel like the flavors have as much of a variety as say Thai food or Indian food, so after 9 days of Chinese food all day long, i wanted just one break. But, since the restaurant was closed, i had to eat elsewhere, and when i came back here for the sunset, i just had a beer and sadly longingly looked at the menu that had pizza, steak, and other stuff. Heh, nothing is ever easy here.

So… that’s it. I did it. I traveled the whole route of the Silk Road in Gansu province. I made it to the edge of the old Chinese empire. Now what? I had two options: 1) I could press on westward and go into the next province or 2) I could loop back east and check out this beautiful Tibetan village up in the mountains. I chose option #2… but sadly, there was no way for me to do it. The village was a 3 hour bus ride up a windy mountain from the nearest town, Lanzhou, which is where i had started, and even just getting to Lanzhou would be a pain. I explored every possible option of trains, flights, etc. Everything was either way too expensive or sold out. I seriously spent *hours* trying to find a way. Finally i gave up. Nothing is ever easy here.

Time to keep heading west.

Dunhuang was my 4th and last stop of the Hexi Corridor. This is now beyond the fort and past the edge of the wall. Back in the day, this was an important oasis trading town out in the desert in the middle of nowhere, where two different silk road routes crossed.

I took the train there and for the first time got to try the hard sleeper. As I mentioned in another post, there are a lot of different train tickets you can get. The nicest one is soft sleeper, but I never tried that one. Hard sleeper is a compartment with 6 bunk beds, 3 on each side. The compartment is wide open, so you hear all the noise from people walking around, babies crying in other compartments, people boarding the train, talking on their phones, and farting loudly and spitting. Without earplugs, you wont get much sleep. They give you a blanket and pillow. Also, the top bunk is very close to the ceiling, so even a not tall person like me will smack their head into the ceiling on average 2 to 3 times per ride. When I woke up, I looked out the window and saw nothing but barren desert as far as the eye could see. Wow. It really hit me at that moment just how far out in the middle of nowhere I had gotten.

Food-wise, Dunhuang is known for donkey meat. I decide “why not?” and went to this restaurant that is well known. They actually had an English menu which helpfully showed items like “Braised donkey penis”. Now, I didn’t have much interest in munching on donkey dicks regardless of how they were prepared, but was pretty shocked to see that the price was almost 30$… Other than the Peking Duck, this is the most expensive food I’ve seen in China. In contrast, the donkey noodles I got were only $2. The noodles had that great hand pulled noodle texture, but the sauce was just ok. Given the amount of sauce on the noodles and the amount of spices in the egg rolls, I don’t know if I could really tell the difference between donkey and any other meat. At one point, the server beckoned me to come into the kitchen and watch the guy make the noodles. It was super impressive! He was able to turn a lump of dough into noodles, completely by hand, in just 2 minutes flat. Crazy! Check out the video below if you have 2 mins to spare.

If you take the road just 5 minutes from town, you see the dunes. Oh man. It was such a crazy sight. You just look down the road and there are these *massive* 800+ foot tall dunes. It really was mesmerizing. The highlight of this area is this tiny little oasis with a temple next to it. This is one of the things I had wanted to see most on this trip ever since I saw a photo online. It is just so incredibly picturesque… A tiny little oasis surrounded by colossal dunes. I kept envisioning traders back in the day… wandering for ages through the dunes with their camel caravans and then spotting this little body of water. It must have looked so miraculous. I sat there entranced for a while and took about a million photos.

One of the things you can do here is ride an Atv. I decided to try it out and it was pretty fun to zip up and down the dunes. Eventually the guide motioned that we needed to switch and that he would drive. I guess this is where the “thrill” part of the ride is as he swerved all over the place pretty fast. At one point the guy was getting a little too close to..the crest of one of the dunes and I started feeling nervous… when all of a sudden he cuts a super sharp turn and we go streaming straight down the dune at about a million miles an hour. It was nuts!! Super fun tho.

After watching the sunset, I started climbing down the dunes and at one point you can pay to use a toboggan to zoom the rest of the way down. Afterwards, went out to get some food. Had some tasty dumplings and these *super good* ribs. Yum!!

My third stop on the Silk Road was Jiayuguan. This is the most narrow section of the Hexi Corridor, so China built a large fort there. Anyone trying to enter the country from the west would need to pass through here, so this was a critically strategic spot to protect China from invaders back in the day. Also, this is officially the very end of the Great Wall (unofficially though, everything is a bit murky as there were various iterations of sections of the wall build by various dynasties, lots of which have been lost to time and decay 🤷‍♂️… Let’s just call this the end 🙂).

This place seemed pretty cool from the guidebook, but the more I read about it, the more disenchanted I felt about it. A lot of the fort has been reconstructed, and so has much of the Great Wall here. Everyone on the Lonely Planet forums likens this place to Disneyland and scoffs at how fake it is. At the last minute I actually tried to skip this entire town, but due to train schedules etc, I couldn’t easily avoid it.

When I went to the fort, let’s just say that everyone was right. Yes, the fort (as you can see from the photos) actually looks pretty impressive, but that’s if you are not looking at it up close. As you get closer, things definitely look a bit fake. Everything is a bit too new looking. To make matters even worse, they have teenage boys dressed up in armor pacing around and “guarding” the fort. They also have archery competitions and other cheesy crap. It really does feel like more of an amusement park than a historical site.

Eventually, I headed back to town, feeling a bit bummed that I kind of wasted a day out of my brief vacation. When I went to get dinner, I wandered into a restaurant, and as usual started peering at the photos on the wall to try to figure out what to get. The server was way ahead of me, and punched some stuff into her translation app to show me: “You want lamb Kebabs?”. I responded with “Fuck yeah!! Gimme 20 of those things!”. Just kidding… I actually just smiled enthusiastically, sat down, and then was a bit shocked when she brought out *20* skewers.

Luckily, the amount of lamb on each skewer wasn’t too crazy, so it actually ended up not being as much of an overwhelming amount of food as I initially thought. The lamb was super good! Very nicely seasoned, a little spicy, and tender. When I was almost done with my million skewers, I decide to ask if they had any vegetables. I’ve been eating pretty much only meat and carbs since I started this trip, and it seemed like the right thing to do. The lady smiled happily and came back with some slices of potato on skewers and what looked like a fistful of chives. Hmmm.. Not exactly what I had in mind, but the lady seemed so happy about it that I just agreed.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, people here not being entirely friendly and seeming indifferent isn’t 100% the case. Some people were really nice and friendly and genuinely seemed happy to help you out. These interactions were always really fun to have and helped brighten things up. Anyways, the potato skewers were good and the greens were quite tasty too. One interesting thing here is that the beer bottles had a weird cap on them. It was somehow halfway between a bottle cap and a pop tab. Pretty cool actually as you didn’t need a bottle opener.

After my day sightseeing, I was back in Zhangye and looking for food. It was fascinating to me that I didn’t see any international tourists whatsoever when I wandered the streets. In a couple posts online people had written that they didnt see a single other white person there the whole time. It felt so cool to me that I was this far off the beaten track that I was the only foreigner in town. Just as I was thinking that, I noticed some foreigners sitting at a table. Dammit. Well, I am *almost* the only foreigner in town.

Again, I went back to the same little area that had hundreds or restaurants and stalls, and again I wandered around awkwardly not being sure what to get. I decided to get some fried rice for a change after living off of dumplings, noodles, and stir-fry for days. I went into a place that had several photos of fried rice on the wall. All the photos were a bit blurry and it was impossible to tell exactly what was going to be in the rice. I randomly point to one. As usual, even with just pointing to a photo, there is confusion and she rattles off a bunch of questions to me, none of which I understand. She gives up trying to explain/ask and just motions me to sit down.

After some time, a server brings me this bowl of broth with a few herbs floating around in it. Umm.. Huh? This is clearly not what I ordered. I mean, the photo wasn’t super clear, but it was definitely rice. Did I somehow miss something important when the woman was asking me all those questions? I sit there for a while wondering how to confront them and explain that this was not what was in the photo. To make things worse, I taste the broth and it is completely bland. This is not what I want. I sit for a while, trying to muster courage for the confrontation and start googling translations.

Finally, just as I was about to get up and walk across the room, the server comes back and gives me my fried rice. Ohhhh. I guess the broth thingy was just a bonus that they give you before your meal. Lol… So glad I hadn’t gotten up yet and shamed myself by complaining! In the end, the fried rice was great.

Oh, one other thing I’ve wanted to mention. For some reason, the people here drink beer out of the tiniest tiny cups. They are maybe 2 or 3 shots worth of beer. No idea why the cups are so little! On top of that, all the beers that you get are large beers like a 22oz, so the tiny cups seem even more ridiculous given the size of your beer.

The second big draw in Zhangye is the Danxia park. These are China’s rainbow mountains, so called because the multicolored layered sediment forms rainbow stripes. It’s more just the upper half of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow) and not so much the bottom half. It’s considered one of China’s most spectacular natural wonders. The geography here really is super impressive, and it’s very beautiful and unique. Inside the park you take shuttle busses to lots of different Vistas where you can admire different mountains from different angles. I came here the same day as Matti Si (in my previous post). Being able to see these two very different, but both exceptional, places in one day was pretty amazing.

About an hour outside of Zhangye there are these cliff temples called Mati Si. It was a long bumpy taxi ride out there and the scenery got more and more rural till we were out in the middle of nowhere. This area definitely feels more Tibetan than Chinese and there are lots of Tibetan prayer flags around. I walked up to the first temple I saw and walked inside the courtyard. Tibetan prayer wheels were on both sides of me. I was the only person there and everything was completely silent and still. After a bit, I saw one solo monk circumambulating the temple, around and around. It was a magical moment and one of the ones I’ll remember most from this trip. Just me, the temple, silence, and this one single monk.

On this trip I had planned on avoiding the Tibetan areas of China. Since I had spent a couple weeks in McLeod Gange way back when, I felt like i had already gotten the Tibetan experience and wanted to concentrate on things I hadn’t experienced while I was here. But being here really brought back the magic of the Tibetan world. The beautiful temples, monks, prayer wheels, etc. I definitely feel super drawn to this stuff.

The cave temples themselves are absolutely incredible. They were chiseled into the rock wall probably almost 1,500 years ago. It’s almost unfathomable how people were able to do this back then without machinery. There are a bunch of narrow passageways and stairs inside the cliff that you scramble up and down… some of them very steep. Inside different areas you would find various Buddhas and candles and incense. The pictures really dont do it justice! You’ll see the temples way at the top section of the cliff… That’s how high these crazy internal passageways in the cliff went.

At one point and old lady stopped me to take a photo of me with her grandkid. She was super excited when I agreed. Clearly there are not very many foreigners here, heh.

Zhangye was my second stop in the Hexi Corridor. One thing that was obvious right away is that things are much cheaper out here. My hotel room was 20$, more than half the price of the one in Beijing, yet way nicer. I spent some time just wandering around town and exploring when I got the email… Unbelievably, my luggage was found!! And they were sending it to the airport here in Zhangye. Omg. I was ecstatic!! I had 200% given up on my luggage and was already trying to figure out how I would buy all new clothing.

The airport in Zhangye is barely an airport… More like a small military airstrip an hour outside of town. I took a cab there around 5pm… to find the place basically abandoned. There were a few janitors sweeping up and all of the ticket windows etc were shut. Oh man. Did I really take a taxi an hour out here for nothing??!! I searched around for someone and then, lo and behold, someone comes out and hands me my suitcase. Wow. I have never been so happy to see a luggage in my life!! I headed back to town so happy, not caring about the wasted two hours or cab fare.

Back in town, it was time to find some dinner. There is this big area here that has tons and tons of food stalls and little restaurants. I wandered around, up and down each aisle, trying to figure out what to get. To be honest, it was a bit intimidating. As mentioned, now that I am in Gansu, there is *zero* English. Anything I wants to eat or ask for I’d have to get via pointing or pantomime. Looking at various pictures on the restaurant walls and at stuff being cooked, it was hard to tell what it was. What kind of meat is it? What is mixed in with those noodles? What kind of sauce is in this dish? What even is *that* thing?! With a hundred little eateries, it was so tough to choose. What if I got something and it was horrible? Would I have to choke it down? I kept wandering and having difficulty deciding.

Skewers are big here. Yeah, yeah, I know we have skewers at home and everywhere else, but here in China hey are absolutely all over the place. Practically every street sells skewers of various kinds of raw meats. People just point at what they want, the sellers quickly grills them up and then you wander around chomping skewers. You see people wandering around eating skewers constantly. Anyways, I got a couple skewers to eat while i wandered about.

Finally, I decided on a place. I got this dish that ended up being these little riblets doused in chili’s and Sichuan peppercorns and a delicious sauce. So good!