A little history - a very tall mtn range, the Tian Shan, bisect this province pretty much from east-west. Because of their height, they get heavy snowfall in winter and the resulting water flow sustains an oasis culture in this otherwise desperately dry desert. To the North of the mountains is the Gobi desert and to the South is the Taklamakan desert. By both routes the ancient Silk Road was established. Our trip was essentially the northern branch of the Silk Road - through the major oases of Turpan (a grape/raisin center) and Hami (a growth area for cotton and sweet and juicy Hami melons - apparently they are exceptionally sweet because of the warm days and cold nights!) To the West are the mountains of Kazackstan, Afghanistan... and to the Eastern end are the fertile valleys of China. The Great Wall deteriorates to mud way out here. Gigantic dry river beds (perhaps a mile+ across) sweep across to flatland of this desertified country.
The Uyghur people are descended from a nomadic tribal culture from the Mongolian steppes and, many claim, from very, very early Turkic migrations. For hundreds of years there was strong Buddhist influence in this area, but that was overrun by Muslim influence in the 700's and onward. Currently they mainly practice the Muslim religion and thus hold two strong cultural beliefs - tribal and religious. Whoever they descended from, they are now on a collision course with the Chinese government. The Uyghur people want autonomy and the government is determined not to let that happen. ("there are minerals in them thar deserts", to adapt a phrase!) In order to assure the Chinese domination of the area there is significant resettlement of Han Chinese out in the west. The booming building construction is widely evident in cities and towns here also. One afternoon after work in Beijing I saw a giant oily black cloud rising from somewhere in the city. Apparently a Uygher family tried to drive in and explode inside the Forbidden City. Instead they only rammed into a crowd of commuters. Many people, including the family, were killed. The news did hit the airways that night, but was supressed by morning.
Observations of the present
I'm not sure just what ores or gases are being extracted out here, but there are wind farms and thousands of miles of high tension wires that extend beyond sight range patched all along the road and railroad lines. (Again I don't know how that wind energy is stored and how it can be transported to cities. It reminds me a bit of the Icelander's dilemma of having so much geothermal power instantly available and no way to transport it. They have imported aluminum manufacturing business based on low production cost! Perhaps the Chinese will set up heavy industry out here based on wind power energy - supplemented I suppose by more predictable coal power. Perhaps their plants wll be like a Prius - renewable energy when it's available with coal energy backup.
The car carriers can carry up to 28 cars at one time and at the Xinjiang-Gansu provincial border we saw so many car carriers going west that we could not even count them all. There are no old cars in this province. Everyone has a new car (3-5 years old or so!) The trucks are all 22 wheelers with length and width extenders and their loads are usually swathed in well tied down plastic tarps. Big, beautifully wrapped presents! A high speed rail line is nearly finished which will carry people from Beijing to Urumqi (the capital of Xinjiang) 2,200m in 12 hours +, however a long wind baffle tunnel also has to be built to deflect winds which have been know to derail even slower speed trains. BTW the rail line goes on to and through Kazackstan and on until Rotterdam!! So there is the Trans-Siberian RR and this other one farther south. (really interesting to read about the burgeoning rail system in China.)
The land out here changes color all the time. At times the rock is really crumbly and dirty, at times there is only sandstone. Even though we spent quite a bit of time driving from distant place to distant place, we all were constantly startled into "ohhs and ahhs!" by the ever changing land configuations and colors. For most of the trip vegetation was at most 12" high, but often there was nearly none. It's bleak in this desert. Very rarely we saw wild bactrian (2 humped) camels wandering around. I got really excited by that - every time!
One notable feature of this new highway was that there were very frequent culverts under the roads and each one was designed to force water to flow into it. Big birms or sometimes stone walls built to form a funnel were built from about 100 yds out into the desert. While there was absolutely no sign of rain or that there would ever again be rain, evidently there is rain and when it rains it floods badly. We crossed one very wide (at least a mile wide) dry river bed. The highway was elevated up about 10 feet and the adjacent train track was on a bridge that was at least 20 feet off the ground, probably more, built on very substantial pillars. No evidence of water anywhere except the massive effects of water erosion right at our feet.
Desert camping - entered the barren very dry river bed after dark - our driver (#7) took the lead and lead he did. Over, around, through - up steep hills and down - all the while going at top speed - sometimes following road-ish tracks and sometimes forging a new path. Must have driven for 30 minutes during which I never had a clue at all where we were going. We had long since lost sight of the other drivers. At some unsignaled point he pulled up in front of 4 good sized branches and said "This is it!" I have no idea how he found it. After 10 minutes or so, everyone else pulled up. Each of us was provided with all the requisite camping equipment and sent off to pitch camp. Doing that in complete darkness was a trick. I found I only had to clear 20-30 good sized stones, but had to be reminded firmly to zip up or I might end up sleeping with scorpions!! Reassuring thought. For sure I wasn't going to pee in the deep darkness of night and run the risk of varmints! Meanwhile the drivers were busily making a feast over a few gas cannisters they had brought. It turns out that they were responsible for the meals as well as driving. They did a good job. Bonfire with the 4 branches - warmth of new friends - chill of a desert breeze - PERFECT I spent about an hour looking for satellites and saw none. But did really enjoy an unobliterated gaze at the Milky Way. My neck was pretty stiff by then. I had been too nervous of varmints to lie down for gazing!
The next morning we watched the bare light of the sun brighten and then pop up over the horizon. We finally saw the desert. Right under us was talcum powder sand littered with black rocks of up to 10". The look of it made no sense. Obvious water erosion undercutting conglomerate dunes, but absolutely no view of mountains or other source of so much water or rocks for that matter. It was mysterious. I wondered if the rocks were break offs from the disintegrating mountains near Urumqi, but by now they were about 500 miles away and farther north. Spent the morning hiking across the riverbed and up into some silt hills on the far side. We came across red, green and white sands at various points - and lots of different kinds and colors of stones. Some people found stones with holes in the center and felt good about that. Others found raw jade. I found a little piece of raw jade which I wonder if I can get sliced and made into a necklace. but it's probably too grotty - a new word I learned from the Brits on the trip. There were road tracks crisscrossing the desert, punctuated every now and then by a flower-like design impressed into the center between the treads. One of the petroleum engineers on the trip said that was from a sonar pad that shook sound vibrations deeply into the Earth looking for signs of oil or gas deposits - or whatever else they could see patterns of.
Visited the ancient city of Jiaohe built on a mesa between two river segments from a river originating in the Tian Shan range. It reminded me of Masada in its hot, dry, history filled, mud brick decay, but in this case the gardens were abundant in the river beds and the city was more of a transit stop for the Silk Road merchants than a citadel. Originally, or at least early on a Buddhist center, at a later point the niches were filled in with bricks as other groups took control. The erosive decay of wind and perhaps water mean that this antiquity will be lost before long. Mud brick is hard to preserve against those odds. It was fun to wonder who had wandered the streets and alleys and what they'd been selling or buying. It was more fun to imagine the camel caravans crossing the horizon from one direction or the other and stopping for a final reprieve before entering the wicked heat and blistering sand of the deserts in any direction. Apparently this city was abandoned soon after a battle lost to Ghengis Khan in the mid 1200s. While the city is no longer used, the valley is completely filled with gardens and trees. Quite beautiful in the desolation of the nearby desert.
Magao Buddhist Grottos - Visited them yesterday. Amazing that they were first carved out in about 350AD when Buddhism began to gain a foothold in western China, Tibet and Mongolia. Forged from digging deep caves into hard conglomerate rock and built to hold both very large and small meditation halls decorated with Buddhas of all shapes and sizes, all modeled in 3D and surrounded by wall art and relief sculptures. In one there was a 28 meter high seated Buddha. In another a reclining Buddha of about the same length. Floor to ceiling were painted frescos: some of living things and some of Buddha medallions (millions of those it seemed.) The apsaras are floating angel like figures (though in SE Asian Buddhism and Hinduism apsaras are many armed female figures). These apsaras are gorgeous - to my eye - surrounded as they are by flowing rivers of ribbon. I guess these particular figures were the product of a particular time because they are not present in many of the grottos. Their air dances reminded me of the Chinese ribbon dances at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics for example. Another feature of the caves were the statuesque attendants to each Buddha. I don't know their titles and which, if any were Bodhisatvas, but I was very impressed by the skin and facial features which represented almost all lands and peoples - from very large, muscular, ferocious defenders to refined and more delicately featured priestly figures - from pitch black to quite white - round eyed and not. The robes were elaborately and delicately painted. Considering that these caves were prepared and decorated between 300 and 600 AD, the skills and talents of the artisans were considerable. There was a terrific display in the museum of how the caves were dug out and supported, the number of layers of special treatments it took to prepare the walls for painting, the methods of preparing the clear, bright, long-lasting paints and also how the elements of weather and time contrived to sustain the art for these many centuries. All in all it was a wonderful experience and I'd love to do it again. But the holiday crowds were oppressive. Being the national holiday week, everyone is traveling, and this is one of the main Buddhist grottos in the country - along with being right next door to the world class Singing Sand Dunes in Dunhuang. Another place I'd go back to in a flash.
The dunes are majestic and wind carved - with narrow, knife edge ridge runs connecting them. Sand is really difficult to walk in, especially dry, fine grained, wind blown sand. I climbed up to the first ridge and knew that I would hold up the whole group if I tried to keep going. So I bowed out of the trip to the top. I was sad not to keep going, but undaunted I found my way to camel central to join a camel train up the dunes. There must have been about 1000 camels all together. Most were tractable, but some just kept bawling and spraying spit all around them. All of them were Bactrian, which continues to strike me as so unusual. I bought a ticket and then, with the help of sign language and the good graces of a group of Chinese travelers I found my camel. You might think it was an easy task - but you would be wrong. First, a ticket doesn't represent "the next camel", it represents a particular camel and some bartering between camel drivers for which line that camel will go in. So you wander in and about the camels rising and falling all around you - bawling and throwing spittle around. As it happens I couldn't say numbers in Chinese, much less hear one sound from another in a camel driver's dialect at full throttle! That's where this helpful family came to my rescue. Then I was off and running up the sand dune behind a line of other camels each guided by a rope attached to a prong in its nostril. I think I'd throw my spit around too, if someone stuck a guide rope into my nostril!!
Near the top we got off and walked the rest of the way to the ridge, only to be facedd with miles and miles of unending windblown sand dunes and valleys. Unfortunately, all this time my camera was back at the hotel being charged up. I did get the chance to run down the slope - which is an awesome blast! Heels slam down hard, lean back, and catapult down in 2 minutes what it just took 20 minutes to climb!! NO fear of rocks. There are none, just one of the world's softest sands making up a 1800 ft elevation. My travel mates said that they ran down from the top in about 20 minutes. They said it was wonderful. they also said that the climb up was extreme and that near the top they were all on all fours, fighting sand, breezes, heat and breathlessness. The ridge was about 6 inches wide and would have been very scary if there had been the remotest possibility of falling against rocks. Thousands of vacationers were scattered all over the duneside - they looked a bit like skiiers without any experience of slalom. No one had sleds, but with appropriate safety monitoring, I think that would have been cool. That night I had a dream about trying to find my camel in the rising and falling sea of noisy camels. It must have been a metaphor for something!
Dune buggies, 2 seater planes and blowing sand. From the top it was easy to see the desert encroaching on the city. When asked about sand on the airport tarmac or on the rails of the new high-speed train line being built nearby, we were told that there were a lot of people in China and the sand would be swept ayay.
I have forgotten to mention that high tension wires run everywhere - in all directions all over China (but not on these dunes!) It is energy made visible. They fuel the cities and industries that all the new highways are connecting. All new roads and bridges. All new cars and trucks. All new energy sources (there must be solar fields somewhere too!)
Gas prices 22 liters = 169 RMB (~ 6RMB to $1) one of our 4wd trucks held 80 litres, I haven't taken the time to work out the math comparison. It's 2200 miles from Urumqi to Beijing. One of our drivers used to drive produce there. If he got there in 2 days he go a 1000 RMB bonus. If 4 days, his pay was docked. They all drank gallons of Red Bull!
In Jiaguanyuan area of Gansu province - less produce on trucks, fewer trucks going east than west. Trucks going west were heavily loaded and overloaded with heavy manufactured goods. First sighting of a beef truck going west. We eat a lot of beef, but haven't seen any land that could support herds of cows.
Talked with a fellow traveler about his experience with Chinese layers of authority. He works for Land Rover/Jaguar in the department that works on standard setting. So if a Land Rover car is being produced and everyone agrees to the details of the design, then someone says the angle of the tailpipe is wrong, production stops while all the different authorities who agreed before have to reconvene and discuss it all over again. Now they've made it possible to register the built cars, but if in the future the change in the angle of the exhaust pipe is upheld, then there will need to be a recall to change it. OMG that would drive me to distraction.
Collected rocks and sand from each major stop and then one new friend collected more sand from the Danxia Landforms trip that happened the following week. In fact on that trip they found some Ming dynasty coins, on 2 separate days, and I was lucky enough to get one.
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