A Tale of Two Deserts
Before we left, Ray arranged a road trip to several places:
- Qinghai Lake, the largest lake in China, whose western edge has a site called “Bird Island”.
- Chaka Salt Lake
- Golmud, where one previously would go to catch a bus to Tibet. Now people can just take the train directly from Beijing, which started running fairly recently.
- Dunhuang, where we are now
Our driver knew a few dozen words of English and basically didn’t try to talk to us the whole time. But the vehicle was a good Toyota Land Cruiser, and he was quite competent at Chinese driving, which is to say, using your horn as you pass a truck on a blind curve to alert anyone that might be coming the other way (and to encourage the truck to stay in the lane). In the first three hours of the trip, we saw the remains of two massive truck accidents. Perhaps it just takes them a really long time to get them off the road. And the roads don’t have shoulders — if people stop, they usually just stop in the lane.
The guidebook suggested that there were places to hike around Qinghai Lake, and the plan was to spend two nights there. But once we got there, we were pretty much funneled directly to Bird Island, which consists of a “blind” at a place called “Egg island” where you can watch various waterbirds through your binoculars and see several large unattended egg shaped objects of dubious validity, and a hillside next to two large rocks where hundreds of common cormorants nest. It was a nice enough afternoon, but one’s options were pretty limited. And it didn’t really look like there were any hikes to be had — certainly no information in English about any — so we decided to just spend the one night and continue on.
The guidebook suggested that the tour at Chaka Salt Lake included a ride on a freight train, a visit to a “salt house”, and an optional cruise. But after paying the 20 yuan ticket price, we were dropped off at the grimy outskirts of a salt factory. There were micro train tracks amid industrial detritus. We wandered out on the train tracks a ways, watching several small trains hard at work bringing out huge buckets of wet salt. Nobody offered to let us ride any. No ferries or salt houses in evidence. No stunning vistas, just a lot of the usual strange colors you see in dense saline water mixed with litter. Our driver did not seem to know any more about the site than we did, so we continued on.
This entire portion of the trip was on the northern Tibetan plateau, in Qinghai province. It looks a lot like Nevada — a large empty space punctuated by the occasional ridge of mountains — but it all happens at 11000 feet (instead of 3500 for most of Nevada). The temperature was pleasant and the air was dry (as it had been in Xining as well) instead of the sweltering mugginess of Beijing and Xi’an. Not long after leaving the salt lake, we were on roads which would go on for 40 miles without a curve, then shift to a different bearing for several more miles to avoid the nearby mountains.
Golmud still seemed to have quite a bit going on — perhaps there were lots of people going to Tibet before the Olympics. We were turned down at the first two hotels we tried, but got into a third which was cheap but didn’t have air conditioning. The dry air let us do some laundry even though we were only there one night.
The original plan for the tour supposed it would take two days to drive from Golmud to Dunhuang, and the driver estimated “10 hours”. But it all happened in seven hours. There was not a single town in between Golmud and Dunhuang which was large enough to support a hotel in any case. The only accommodation evident was tent cities for the workers who are rebuilding the road. It looked like they might make it four lane.
The first five hours or so continued along the Tibetan plateau, passing another salt lake with an even more gigantic factory, crossing long dusty flat deserts and occasional ridges of mountains. But at one point we crossed a pass, and descended to about 3500 feet and completely different scenery, including lots of sand dunes. Someone walking by the side of the road had distinctly Mongolian heavy clothes (he must have been very hot in them). Also the temperature became a lot more like Phoenix.
Between the skipped day at Qinghai Lake, and getting to Dunhuang in one day instead of two, we’ve gotten two more days to spend here — it’ll be nice to be in one place for four days. There are said to be a lot of interesting things to see and do around Dunhuang, and we’ll let you know how they turn out.