A year away: June 27-29 - Dunhuang, Gansu

Next stop, Dunhuang, famed for its sand dunes and the Mogao Grottoes. I stayed at a cool guesthouse right on the sand dunes about 6km south of the town and accessible by public bus. Arriving in the town and heading toward the dunes you suddenly see this huge mountain of sand rise up above the trees. I had seen the mini-dunes in Death Valley, CA, but these are on a different scale - awesome, and the biggest in China, I think. During my 3 days in Dunhuang I went out to the dunes twice, in both cases avoiding the extortionate 100 yuan entrance charge to the 'official' dune area by skirting 1km or so along the huge fence they've erected to keep people out (this is so typical of China - fencing off sand to extract money from people!!). The first night I chatted briefly with a Kiwi couple who were staying at the same place and then headed to the sand. After finding the end of the fence and starting to climb (ignoring the 'Access forbidden. Fines applicable' signs in Chinese - if asked I couldn't read them) a hear a guy yelling at me through a megaphone (so I'm not exactly the first person to do this) 'Stop. Come here' to which I reply 'Why?' and receive no reply. I just kept going, more than half expecting to be chase by the guy on a quad bike or something, but evidently he'd given up and I was left in peace to explore. I walked for 2 or 3 hours and climbed a long dune ridgeline of crumbling sand to a peak from where I had a commanding view of the large sand area. The light wasn't fantastic for pictures but experiencing sand on this scale was a very cool thing for me - it's certainly a real little desert here.

Next day I headed out to the Mogao caves and was forced to pay the full 180 yuan for entrance including the premium for an English-speaking guide. I joined 2 young Israelis so our groups was pleasantly small compared to the 20-30 strong Chinese groups. The guide was very knowledgeable if a little hard to understand, and explained a lot about the paintings and statues, the meanings, the changing influences from India and local Chinese style, what was original and what was restored, etc. She answered our questions and showed us around quite throughly. It was certainly amazing to see paintings and statues and even wood and straw used inside the statues that is 1300 or 1400 years old and has been almost perfectly preserved by the dry desert environment. The most impressive aspect of the whole place for me was the stash of documents found in the document cave - tens of thousands of manuscripts and paintings from thousands of years and in many different languages that until the early 20th century had been hidden and forgotten. It is I believe the largest collection of ancient documents ever found however sadly much of it has been dispersed over the globe by various shady foreign characters (the Chinese side of the story calls them thieves, but they paid for the goods) and corrupt officials who bought or stole thousands of pieces before the Chinese government took over. Just looking at all the ancient languages used to write these documents is fascinating and I am sure many of the scrolls and paintings are simply priceless. Unfortunately we couldn't take photos at all. After the caves we returned to the town with the idea of arranging a camel trek. After much negotiation the idea seemed impractical especially in terms of value for money so we dropped the idea. We had planned to camp out one night in the desert instead of doing the camel thing, but I gave up that plan and instead opted to keep moving on into Xinjiang.