Silk Road - 15th September (Friday)

Sometime in the night, there was shouting and lots of noises. I assume that there was a crowded station and a lot of people were rushing to get up. We slept in and woke up at 9am. We were so tired the day before and it felt really good to get sufficient rest. Christine and Clare spoke in hushed voices and kept the door closed while Ross and I were sleeping. They were nice companions. Christine had also tried to get breakfast in the dining car but realised that it was booked by tour groups. That would have been another reason to stock up for the train...

I went to wash up for the day at the area with three sinks. I was awe-struck by the scenery outside where the window was fully down giving a cold chill. But it was amazingly beautiful with desert and barren mountains.

When I was waiting to get into the toilet, a pushy lady on the group, Diane, sort of insisted I should check whether there was anyone inside and said "I was the perfect person to knock on the door to check" while I was contented to just wait a while.

I realised that almost everyone on the trip had brand new cameras. They were mostly bigger cameras with 12 times optimal zoom. I would really love to have more powerful optimal zoom on our Canon Ixus.


We reached ShanDan station and had to make a rush for it since it was a two minutes stop. We realised the station was near to a military base where we were not supposed to take photos. We waited for a while before the bus appeared. Our local tour guide's name is Helen. We stopped on the way to take photos of ruins of the Great Wall.



From the ruins, it was only 60km away from the hotel. Nearing the town, it was nice to see old buildings. We saw a big bell tower right in the middle of the road, as big as the one we saw in Xian. We have reached the province of Gansu, in Zhangye. We are now on the Hexi Corridor of the Silk Road. On the bus, Helen told us that Zhangye had a very dry climate.

We reached our hotel, Zhangye Hotel and was quite surprised at the familiarity of the carpark entrance. It reminded us of a hotel we stayed at in Tibet (probably Xigaze or TseDang). After washing up, we met up with the group again at 2pm. It felt good to take a shower. We had noodles opposite the hotel. We were skeptical of the food, remembering the recommendation Lucy had before but the noodles turned out to be really good. Ross had beef soup noodles while I had fried beef noodles. It cost us only 5Yuan for each bowl of noodles.


We walked to the nearby Great Buddha temple after lunch. The temple is 900 years old and houses the biggest reclining Buddha in China. The temple looked really old and badly needed the maintenance job which it is now going through. We saw lots of scaffolding around the temple and the Buddha itself. There were 18 arhats in the temple beside the Buddha. Behind the Buddha was his disciples. It was quite nice though we could see bits of the statues decaying, for example, a foot, finger or arm missing. Because of the scaffolding, we could hardly see the statues of the disciples behind.

We walked around the temple grounds. There was also a room that contained relics. While we were there, there were numerous other groups of tourists, from Taiwan and HongKong. I could hear that they were given a lot of information about the temple. I wondered whether it was because we were in a western group where the people wouldn't be able to understand Chinese folk tales anyway.

We walked from the Buddhist temple to a nine-storey wooden Pagoda. The entrance was 5Yuan and we paid to climb up. The climb was very steep and it wasn't exactly a very grand view of the town.

Ross and I then walked further to Ming Qing Street which the food street was supposed to be. We kept looking for post cards but couldn't find any. We walked a fair way, even past the post office but they didn't have any post cards for sale. We managed to walk to the Bell Tower before heading back. It was a good thing Ross had a knack for directions since I was totally lost.


We met the group again at 6:30pm to have dinner at Ming Qing Street. We went into a Chinese restaurant in Qing Ming street called Tai Tai Xiang. We ordered a variety of dishes that was popular with everyone. We had a brief walk around and then with Chris, we walked back to the hotel where some guys were flying a terribly long kite that was joint at the end.

Had an early rest after watching Scrubs on our notebook.