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I woke up a few times during the night on the train but nevertheless I had a good sleep till 7am. When I looked out of the train window, I could see rugged flat land with the snow-capped Qilian mountain as background.

Getting out of the train station was relatively painless compared to Lanzhou. We were met by our local guide Miss Pan, and we headed to our hotel Chang Cheng Binquan (Great Wall Hotel) which looked rather tacky (it reminded me of the tackiness of Las Vegas) as the building looked like a Great Wall fort.

Jiayuguan City looked very clean compared to other Chinese cities - there was only one rather ugly-looking steel plant sticking out like a sore thumb.

We had breadfast in the hotel - must say it was not really appetising as some of the food did look a bit dodgy in terms of freshness. Also I had not been feeling too well again with the stomach. Luckily we had the morning free, so after a refreshing shower I just lied on the bed watching television and generally took it easy. Also as we had to wait for our suitcases, we had to stay in the room anyway - a waste of time as the cases didn't arrive till about noon-time, when we were just about ready to go for lunch at the hotel.

The weather has changed from calm and sunny to windy and rain! After lunch we headed off to Jiayuguan Fort but the weather was so awful that at one point we were considering of turning back to the hotel. However we finally decided to go to Jiayuguan and braved the rain. This city only had rain 3-4 days per year on averag - so how lucky (or unlucky) were we?!

When we reached the fort, we first paid a visit to the newly-opened Great Wall museum, which had some very interesting exhibits - from models of various parts of the Great Wall, to the tools and weapons found along the Great Wall, and bricks with painted pictures on.... It's a lot more interesting than I expected.

Finally the rain had eased but it was still very windy - we decided to go to the Fort for a visit anyway. The gale-force wind was making walking difficult, and it was doubly-hilarious when we were blown left, right and centre. I supposed this experience was rather good, as it made us appreciate the tough lives in this remote part of the Great Wall and how difficult it would have been all these years ago, in the golden age of the Silk Road. We really had a good laugh though, and I laughed so much that I had so much sand in my mouth that it felt gritty for the rest of the day.

We decided to postpone our visitg to the Overhanging Great Wall, as the weather really was not good at all. So we headed back to the hotel again. I spent about 45 minutes at an internet cafe, and then went back to the hotel room for a power nap - though I nearly ended up oversleeping.

We walked to the restaurant nearby for dinner - as usual the food was absolutely yummy and enough to feed 30 people. I really didn't like to see so much food being wasted.

A walk around the block and spent a bit of time at the supermarket. Everyone seemed to have come out with something! I stocked up on some more spaceship buns in case I got sick in the next few days and needed some plain food, rather than the delicious but heavy meals at the restaurants.

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