Zhangye

Just 3 hours from Lanzhou to Zhangye, which is a small city of only 1.2 million 🤔 . A smooth train ride and getting colder and wetter, especially as we went through the mountains.

We'd thought it would be worth a stop because of the Zhangye Danxia landforms, which have stripy rainbow colours in the sandstone. Turns out the town is mildly interesting as well and now quite a popular tourist town, the major downside being that we're now sufficiently off the beaten path to be really weird to most Chinese people and the level of staring has reached new peaks.

Our train got in at around 2 and thanks to a very hot day and unnecessarily stressful taxi faff decided to rest rather than trying to go to the mountains that day. Went for an evening wander and discovered that the town has a very active and interesting night market which has enthusiastically embraced one of China's greatest scourges: the recordable loudspeaker which anyone can buy, record a message on and blast at full volume from their stall. Lost our hearing. Ate things on a stick and very tasty bread.

Went to the mountains the next day which involved walking to the bus station, only to discover the bus we'd aimed for had sold out and Chris had left his passport at home. Walked back to the hostel, and Elli nearly accidentally bought 32 bao. In this part of China 1 bao seems to equal 8 small bao. All very confusing. Corrected the error, retrieved the passport, took the bus, later wished we'd bought more bao.

The Danxia mountains were peak Chinese tourist attraction: you could only get round them on a shuttle bus, which to be fair in the hot sun is the only sensible way of seeing them. The mountains were fabulous, though then you turn around and see 500 tourists all getting their umbrellas and visors up in each others business and screaming. It's a shame that the photos of Danxia are so ridiculously unrealistic - they look nothing like most of the posters but are nonetheless still very cool. In the visitor centre afterwards we were relaxing with a drink and a mother and her maybe 8 year old son had a furious battle of wills in which she desperately wanted him to speak to us, while he would clearly rather have eaten his own shoelaces. We tried our best to manage both of them and then made some hasty excuses to leave.

Back to Zhangye, collapse, and headed out with our bags. Delicious cold noodles and preposterous ice cream waffles for dinner, and we hid round the back of the park to avoid being followed by tourists - it didn't work.

Our night train to Dunhuang was at 00.13 so we spent an hour in the train station before it was ready to go, and it felt in the end like we'd been there quite a lot longer than 1.5 days.Читать далее