Silk Road 2003

7 am morning calls - TWICE! As if I would oversleep when I was sleeping next to a telephone.

This morning, instead of having breakfast at the hotel, we went to a local restaurant for the beef noodles soup - a Lanzhou specialty. It was delicious - a bit spicy but it suited me fine. The others found the concept of eating beef noodles instead of bread and egg less welcoming. At 9am we set off on our long journey to Xiahe and Labrang Monastery.

It was not a particularly nice day - cloudy with the occasional drizzle. The traffic jam through the western part of Lanzhou was long and tedious, and the fumes pumping out of the vehicles certainly made the place look very dirty. As hour into the journey we went throug a tunnel, but where's the "clean mountain air" that the itinerary described? With the HGVs still pumping out all the toxic fumes, I wouldn't dare to take a deep breath for this "mountain" air.

En route we stopped at some street stalls to have a look at the fuits and produce they were selling - watermelons, apples, melons etc. Tried some seed melon which was a bit non-descriptive really - a bit like unsweetened watermelon. Andy bought some sunflower seeds for us to try - yum, much nicer than the dried stuff we could get in packets in supermarket.

We stopped at Yinxin restaurant in a town called Linxia for lunch at 1.30pm. As usual a very nice meal - but this time we had Chinese muslim cuisine. There was a wedding banquet at the restaurant and so us nosey tourists gatecrashed and had a good look at the bride. The surrounding at the restaurant was very pleasant and I took a few photos there too.

After lunch it was another two and a half hours drive to Xiahe. En route we stopped at a checkpoint which marked the start of the Tibetan settlement area. It was located above a valley and it was really relaxing to hear the sound of the Da Xia River flowing without any other noise.

Fell asleep on the way to Xiahe and got woken up by Andy when we drove past the Labrang monastery. Steed kept telling us that the hotel was minus 3-star, but it was not that bad. OK, it looked rather deserted. We didn't get given the keys to the rooms, but instead we had to ask the girls at the reception desk at the end of the corridor to open the door for us. I dropped my luggage off and then headed straight out for a quick walk with a few others. Saw the local kids coming out of school and some local people loading wheat onto a donkey cart in the field. Only took very few photos as it was overcast.

Andy told me that our birthdays were only one day apart (he's one day older than me). Somehow I had this inkling when I first met him at Xi'an airport (well, or I knew that our birthdays were very close). Oh well, that's another birthday I would have to remember.

Went to a restaurant nearby for dinner - local Tibetan cuisine but I had a feeling it wasn't quite the real thing judging by some of these dishes. But at least there's no sight of any chips this time, unlike a few other restaurants we had been to so far). When we got out it was pouring down with rain - let's just hope that the weather would improve.

Got back to the room by 8pm and had nothing to do really - too wet outside, everyone was back in the room, television was not working..... Oh well, an early night for sure.

One interesting thought today - when we were travelling on the winding bumpy road to Xiahe, I saw a motorway being built to connect Lanzhou and Linxia (and possibly Xiahe in future?) - read it somewhere that it would really cut down the journey time so that tourists could do Xiahe as a day trip. While this could be a welcoming thought for some (and it might also improve the development and economies of Lanzhou and Linxia), it would also mean that tourists would miss the journey through Chinese countryside at eye-level, which would be a great shame. Even for me, I found this travel experience from Lanzhou to Xiahe worthwhile, despite the rather bumpy 6-hour journey in a minibus. The journey really showed how some of the local people went about their daily lives. While motorways would improve the transport system and speed up development, would development really be the answer to better lives? This sort of development would bring more pollution, more natural habitat being destroyed (trees being cut down, land being flattened). Also were we all too desperate for quick results in the western world, when these local farmers spent long hours evey day working in the fields, hoping their crops would be OK and they would have a good harvest at the end of the season? Two things that the western business world should do better.

Go back to Day 6 / Go to Day 8