Towards the Silk Road
Lanzhou is a relatively small industrial city by Chinese standards, only 3 million people, with rich deposits of oil, coal, nickel, chromium, lead, limestone, gypsum and marble helping to explain its rapid development from ‘barren, backward and impoverished’. Set between mountains this natural corridor linking China to Central Asia also provided a trade route between the Western Tibetan Plateau and Mongolia to the north. Cement works, power stations, aluminium refineries, oil and gas refineries on the city outskirts belch grey haze against a blue sky, clearing after morning rain. As our bus climbs through the smog zone we are greeted by scar-faced mountains draped with alluvial chinese fans patiently awaiting their eventual 1500 kilometre journey down the Yellow River. Green terraces of tended corn contrast the cliff-clay yellows. From the boat terminal we skip-jack across the reservoir past the first major hydro electric dam built in China (and still the largest on the Yellow River) towards the Bingling Grottos. The water rose over 20 metres drowning most of the caves but the best of the Budda carvings are now preserved. They are impressive and make the 1.5 hour bus and 50 minute fast boat taxi ride each way well worth the effort.
A hot shower later and I’m checking my email at the hotel when the girl from the business centre sits beside me and, pointing to my email, asks ‘this word Beijing?’ and then this word ‘station?’ Twenty minutes of chatting I only manage to read but not reply but the experience in communication is memorable. Both Sue and I have noticed a marked difference in the openness of the Chinese towards us foreigners. Having our photos taken with them and practising their English with us is much more common than when we were here in 2002. Our tour guide, Mark, says it is hard to get promotion in the government jobs without English and children now learn it from primary school. He and his wife often encourage their ‘one son’ to speak with foreigners in their home town, Xian. He relates the time his son approached a westerner to practise one of his sentences for the week saying ‘Good morning, you have a big sofa.’ And we all enjoy the universal language of laughter.
The beer garden boys from Tasmania are settled when we join them. They are the two on our trip who will continue through to Tashkent and we enjoy their company. A few ‘kegs’, 1.5 litre bottles of the local brew later, and we are full of good humour and stories. The Eagles’ ‘Welcome to the Hotel California’ is playing in the background and our waiter appears very excited to be serving six foreigners.
With no crowded stations or platforms and a new train, our overnight sleeper to Jiayuguan is relaxed.
Here we are at the end of the Great Wall on the edge of the Gobi Desert with the Snow Mountains of Tibet to the south and the Black mountains to the north, and we are now well off the main tourist route.
Like the Eagles’ lyrics go, we are ‘on a dark desert highway cool breeze in our hair’, beetling westwards in our airconditioned bus alongside latter day caravan traders, Sino trucks loads covered in carnival colours and netted down with ropes. We are travelling four hundred kilometres across the Gobi Desert on the first class four lane highway GZ45. Like the rest of the Chinese economic miracle, even here in the western hard lands the Silk Road is rapidly becoming the Silk Super Highway.