:: zone3 ::

A while since being online for more than a couple of minutes.

Spent two days at Heavenly Lake staying in Yurts (Gers). A beautiful mountain lake area off to the side of the Taklamakan desert. It's the source of some of the water for the Karez in the region. Was nice and relaxing spending a couple of days by the lake. The mountain are snow capped and looked a bit like home (a little like the Nelson Lakes area).

After the nice relaxing, on to long driving days in a bus... Although the views of the sand in the desert are amazing to see, it is a bit tiring spending 22 hours in a bus over a couple of days.

Turpan makes for a pretty hot city, located in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region it is about 35-40C.

After arriving from a 12 hour train ride and a having a relaxing lunch, visited the lowest point in China (2nd lowest in the world). 156m below sea level. In the middle of the salt flats at the lowest point was about 45C. Took a an hour of a bumpy ride in a mini-bus to get there (and an hour back out too).

From there on to visit a small village out of Turpan. The Xinjiang Region is largely muslim, this little village with it mosque and mud/clay houses look more like something out of footage of the Middle East. Stand there look out of the small place, was easy to think were no longer in China. Some of the houses there are over 300-400 years old.