:: zone3 ::

The last couple of days of my time in China were Kashgar. Took it pretty relaxing, made for time to catch up.

The Kashgar animal bazaar had an array of various animals being brought and sold. Although it wasn’t that much different than a New Zealand farmers market, just needed to swap the donkeys for some extra tractors & throw in some swandrys and would be pretty much the same.

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.

The Minshan Sand Dunes in Dunhuang seem to be quite low when the bus arrives to them at 6am. Have to get in at that time if want to catch the sun rise from the top of the Dunes...

Climbing a Sand Dune in the Taklamakan desert takes sometime. Even following the ridge line up, it is two steps forward and one back. Takes a good 20 minutes to get up. Then it is a case of sanding around waiting for the sun to rise.

It is a beautiful thing seeing the sun rise up over the the sand. The shapes of the dunes beginning to become more apparent as the sky gets lighter and the shadows starting to give the Dunes shape. With it getting lighter, can see it was actually quite a climb to the top of the Dunes.