As our guide explained on the way to the airport, Dunhuang is a small oasis town famous for being the last Silk Road stop being the trade route split north and south around the unforgiving Taklamkan Desert. While exploring the area around our hotel during lunch on our own, we didn’t find too much to be fascinated by, although we did find a restaurant where the cook knew how to whip up quite a tasty platter of fried donkey, along with what I thought we some interesting shots which I can only hope can serve as a suitable glimpse of what it was like there.
Also, at a nearby convenience store, several of us became fascinated with some of the snacks they had there, ranging from Yak jerky and dried squid to drinks in peculiar containers that resembled the offspring of a soda can and plastic bottle.
I myself was quite surprised to find that “Jifu” is more than just a translation of my first name into Mandarin.
Unfortunately, as it turns out I’m not all that tasty. Quite the contrary, I’m quite the bitter chocolate treat.
At around 6:30, everyone gathered outside the hotel to make our trek to our camping site far out in the desert …. And by far out, I mean right at the edge of the city at the end of a bumpy unpaved road, where the vegetation simply ceases to exist, and instead massive sand dunes cover the land.
Beautiful at first, yes, but I discovered shortly upon arrival that as you accumulate sand in literally everywhere and in everything you have, the dunes become gradually less majestic to the point that they look like no more than the mound it feels like you have in every shoe.
I only exaggerate; they were absolutely spectacular. Honestly though, I still have yet to get all the sand out of my backpack, plus every other article of clothing I brought out there.
Now, when our guide told us that we could camp anywhere we wanted to, my roommate (tent-mate, in this case actually) took that a bit too literally, at least that’s the way it seemed when he told me that he wanted our tent at a point higher than everyone else’s.
As you can see from the above photo with the barely-noticeable yellow speck in the center, our tent is the only one up atop that God-forsaken dune I followed him up. His plan seemed quite exciting to me at first, out of all fairness, but I began to have second thoughts once I looked down below and realized just how far away we were.
While traveling through the bulk of all the tents way down below on my way to view the sunset, Father Ron Anton, head of TBC, approached me to say in a roundabout way that confirmed my growing fear that we had made a frankly terrible choice. He didn’t come out and say it plainly (“You know, after the sun sets, you might have trouble getting back to your tent all the way out in….” etc, etc.), but the message was clear – THAT'S A BAD IDEA.
So once this was painfully obvious, I first enjoyed the sun settling below the horizon, and the golden glow it bathed the dunes in.
(I know, I know, I'm not looking directly at the camera here)
So fortunately it all worked out in the end. Although my roommate was a bit surprised by what I did, he didn’t mind, which was fine by me. I still couldn’t help but feel a bit embarrassed for making such a mistake; one would think that an Eagle Scout and veteran of scores of camp-outs would’ve know much better than that.
Fortunately, the gorgeous night sky served as the perfect distraction for me, with thousands of pinpricks of light glowing brightly high up above. It was absolutely magnificent, for I hadn’t seen such a clear night since camping out at Philmont Boy Scout Ranch in New Mexico … or, more specifically a night almost as clear as the ones I enjoyed in Philmont, for there was an unexpected amount of light pollution emitted from the "small" town of Dunhuang nearby.
Apparently, over here a population of 150,000 qualifies as “small.”
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