Lanzhou
Travelling to Lanzhou under a little more train experience made it far pleasurable. To start we got in to the fine Chinese spirit of queue jumping to make sure we had suffient bag space in our sleeper. We met the two peps we had seen previously in Xi'an and Pingyao, they planned too, to use Lanzhou as a point to get to Xiahe. The music on trains here is very strange, once borded at 22.00 lullabies where played over the speakers!?
Arriving at Lanzhou was pretty painless, we had taken a hostel address from the recent L.P (as ours is from 1991), turning up only to find it was now a 5 star hotel...oppps. They very kindly reccommend a budget hotel nearby for us.
Lanzhou is not particularly charming and is a thiving industrial city. Fortunatly the city plan (a 15km long road) forms a natural wind tunnel that frees the city from the polluting clouds that can be seen at the far end of town - nice. We have spoken to local people here about the smog, they don't seem to or want to register it, often we have been corrected "the fog today is bad".
In Lanzhou we discovered the chinese supermarkets - a delight for any keen shopper, 3 floors of everything you could imagine, poor Dave.
On finding the correct bus station (there are two each at the opposite end of town) we got our tickets for Xiahe, we leave tommorow. There was rather an awful campaign that caught our eyes at the station, infact you couldn't really escape it. Graffic pictures of the aftermath of road traffic accidents were displayed as public information - what the point was to providing this information we couldn't work out yet, we now felt very uneasy about the 7h bus trip to Xiahe!
We left Lanzhou for Xiahe at 08.30 the next morning in an old minibus, the bus filled up along the unsurfaced road, through various towns collecting anddropping people off, bumping along more cratered road. After 7h of playing chicken round bends and cliffs we arrived at a bus station we suspected was our destination but, not extactly sure where we were. Our hunch was sure confirmed when we spotted the beady eyes of taxi men waiting for us like vultures!
Arriving at Lanzhou was pretty painless, we had taken a hostel address from the recent L.P (as ours is from 1991), turning up only to find it was now a 5 star hotel...oppps. They very kindly reccommend a budget hotel nearby for us.
Lanzhou is not particularly charming and is a thiving industrial city. Fortunatly the city plan (a 15km long road) forms a natural wind tunnel that frees the city from the polluting clouds that can be seen at the far end of town - nice. We have spoken to local people here about the smog, they don't seem to or want to register it, often we have been corrected "the fog today is bad".
In Lanzhou we discovered the chinese supermarkets - a delight for any keen shopper, 3 floors of everything you could imagine, poor Dave.
On finding the correct bus station (there are two each at the opposite end of town) we got our tickets for Xiahe, we leave tommorow. There was rather an awful campaign that caught our eyes at the station, infact you couldn't really escape it. Graffic pictures of the aftermath of road traffic accidents were displayed as public information - what the point was to providing this information we couldn't work out yet, we now felt very uneasy about the 7h bus trip to Xiahe!
We left Lanzhou for Xiahe at 08.30 the next morning in an old minibus, the bus filled up along the unsurfaced road, through various towns collecting anddropping people off, bumping along more cratered road. After 7h of playing chicken round bends and cliffs we arrived at a bus station we suspected was our destination but, not extactly sure where we were. Our hunch was sure confirmed when we spotted the beady eyes of taxi men waiting for us like vultures!
posted by David at 11:03 am
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