Silk Road Expedition, Sept. 4, Day 4 – From Jiayuguan to Xian

The day before, a blanket of fog had successfully prevented me from photographing the majestic mountains by the city. Fortunately, the beautiful blue skies I awoke to provided me with exactly the opportunity that I had been waiting for.

 

The rest of the morning was more or less taken up by a trip to two more historical sites with our tour guides. I only realize now that I haven’t mentioned this before, but in every different city, we also had two local English-speaking tour guides that would show us around, and to make sure that we always could see them, they always carried around flags with the TBC logo on them.

 

That seems to be a widespread practice over here; more or less every tour guide I saw, even those leading Chinese tourists, would bear some kind of small hand-held flag.

 

Anyway, First on the schedule was a tomb of a wealthy man and his wife from the Wei or Western Jin period (Chinese dynasties that exists between 220-420 AD.) Apparently, according to the guide there are roughly 1,400 of these tombs in the area, all of which were constructed by wealthy families who fled to the region to escape the chaos and wars back east. However, the one we visited is the only one opened by the Chinese governor so far, due to the fact that keeping them closed is the best way to preserve their interiors, as no one has developed the technology yet to protect them from oxidation.

 

Now, the tomb itself wasn’t much to look at from the outside. But after traveling down a staircase that led us under the earth, the guide showed as a three-chambered tomb covered with various paintings depiction activities from everyday life back then, such as scenes of hunting, picking fruit, playing music for enjoyment, cooking, etc. Amazingly, these images were painted on the stone walls of an underground structure built without any cement or any other kind of bonding material to hold the stones together … a fact that I only found interesting outside of the tomb. Upon learning this, I spent the rest of the tour in a constant state of fear that a brick would tumble from place, and the entire thing would cave-in. Needless to say, it didn’t help at all knowing that at the same time, I was in the same chilly, underground chamber where two corpses had once lain.

Fortunately, we didn’t stay long, and then it was off to a quick stop at the Hanging Greatwall. And when I mean quick stop, I mean a quick stop, because due to a scheduling mishap, my group (we were always split up into two groups, thus the two local guides in every city) only spent half an hour there. That still didn’t prevent me though from going as far as I could to get some good shots especially of the odd things people had written with stones at the very end, just behind the last tower.

 

Then, it was on to the great ancient city of Xian by train, and what a ride that turned out to be. It was a twenty hour long trek from Jiayuguan, so we took a train with cars that consisted entirely of “hard sleepers” – cubicles with six hard bunks total, three to every wall. It wasn’t that bad at all, to be honest. It was a little cramped, especially in the top bunks (where I slept) but that much was to be expected. It was decent, but it was no Holiday Inn on rails, as testified by the bathroom (which I took a photo of, but will only show to those who want to see it, as it's probably not for the faint of heart.)

 

It's as comfortable as it looks.... meaning it's not comfy at all in any way, shape or form.

At least I finally had some time to catch up on my journaling, where I recorded all the events that you all read about now. Also, at certain points we had quite impressive scenery, like the Himalayan foothills we saw at the very beginning.

There of course were more scenic regions to come, all of which were surprisingly devoid of signs of human settlement. It actually got to the point where I took out my journal and mulled for a page or so over how hard it was to believe the fact those China possesses the world’s largest population when confronted with such vast expanses of empty landscape.

 

It was also during the long ride that I tried to take a photograph of the moon, with absolutely no success with the train ride being so shaky. Perhaps maybe I can use these flat-out terrible photos to convince someone gullible that I took a picture of an angel, or a very, very poorly-constructed UFO of some kind.

 

It was shortly after taking these atrocious pictures that Emilio and I made the acquaintance of a college student from Shanxi province on her way to her university in Shanghai. “Sunny”, as she preferred to be called, possessed extremely good English skills, as I learned while conversing with her, and so I wasn’t surprised at all when she informed me that she was a language major. What came entirely out of left field though was that her language out of choice wasn’t English, but rather Arabic.

 No joke. She was studying Arabic.

To be honest, I was in a state of utter awe (and feeling a bit inferior with my half-rate Mandarin skills). She was extraordinary humble about it all though, and kept telling me encouragingly that anyone can master any language, as long as they’re willing to work for it. Sunny did admit that learning Mandarin wasn’t at all easy, which is why she spontaneously gave me the contact of one of her friends at UIBE just in case I needed help with my Chinese. Oh my word, such kindness!

After I bid goodnight to the extremely sweet-natured girl and made my way back to my bunk just before they shut the lights off at around 10:00 PM. Unfortunately, sleep was not to come very easily, for the fellow in the top bunk across from me made such a ruckus, I could’ve sworn that he was trying to saw logs in his bunk.

Nevertheless, I managed a somewhat decent night’s rest, and in the morning I awoke to find that the landscape now consisted entirely of green hills that the train crossed through a system of impressive tunnels carved into the natural barriers.

 

It wasn’t long at all though until the view slowly became more populated with buildings, starting out with small farming villages and gradually progressing to modern skyscrapers, and it was at that point that towering stone walls appeared in the train windows, thus announcing the conclusion of the longest train ride I had ever taken in my entire life.

 

Xian at last!