June 25, 26 - Jiayuguan, Gansu

From Zhangye to Jiayuguan, the last fort at the western edge of the Great Wall, by train took a few hours.  After a lot of walking around the town I managed to find a good, cheap place to stay - it seemed to have once been a sauna-hotel and was totally not set up to legally accept foreigners, but the location was good and the guy didn't seem to care.  Suits me.  Next morning I got on the bus to go out to the Jiayuguan Fort and happened upon the Israeli girls again.  They'd skipped Mati Si but I'd caught up with them again.  We spent the day together checking out the various attractions associated with the parts of the Great Wall in this area.  We visited a section of reconstructed wall a few km out of town on which we walked for a hour or so up a hill and got a pretty good view of the desolate landscape that pervades the NW parts of China, and then returned to check out the main Jiayuguan fort.  The main fort complex is basically just that - a huge fortified structure with inner and outer courtyards and huge security doors to make it very difficult to get in or out without authority - but the whole thing seems too sterile, too newly-rebuilt, too fake to be particularly impressive.  In some of the buildings in the inner courtyard they had little museum displays set up showing daily life in the whatever Dynasty but it wasn't very convincing.  The armor in the armor and weapons section and the big canons sitting outside were all painted plastic for god's sake - in a museum!  While it all looked OK on the surface it has clearly been built more for photo opportunities than to really teach the visitors anything about the importance, function and history of the wall.  In all fairness the whole experience was somewhat redeemed by visiting the proper 'Great Wall Museum' near the fort (and included in the ticket price).  There they had a lot of interesting, real artifacts and more depth of explanation about what was what, along with plenty of amusing 'embrace the influence of the minorities' BS that seems to pervade every museum in China (in reality most Chinese are traditionally and currently very xenophobic people, but the writeup in museums always tells how they got along with the outside influences of peoples from the north and west and got along well, learned from each other and lived in peace.  Total bollocks).  Strangely though I left without understanding the actual function of the fort structure - neither how it works as a defense in its own right north how it forms part of the overall defense mechanism of the Great Wall.  In that regard I think the educational aspect of the site and museum design is a bit lacking.  Anyway I'm glad I went and thankfully the place wasn't a total tourist zoo so it was a relaxed day.