Masterminding the Silk Road

Last week we took advantage of China's National Week (國慶節) to travel China's Silk Road while it was still warm enough to traverse Xinjiang and Gansu. It's been my dream to make this trip out to the wild wild west for awhile -- perhaps it's because it's so historically important, or because it's so diverse, or maybe even because I reallyreally wanted to ride a camel. :) In any case, this trip was definitely the best adventure I've ever taken thus far, and I highly recommend everyone who has the opportunity to make it out to China to give this region a go-around... it'll change your definition of what China really is, and it'll also make you ponder the richness of human culture. Seriously, how did those traders manage travel through such a desolate place?! I still don't get it even now. So confused? @_@

Day 1: Fly to Urumqi (烏魯木齊)

Day 2: Tianchi Lake (天池)

Day 3: Leave Tianchi and Urumqi --> Turpan (吐魯番)

Day 4: Turpan, leave for overnight to Dunhuang (敦煌)

Day 5: Dunhuang

Day 6: Leave Dunhuang for Jiayuguan (嘉峪關), Jiayuguan, take overnight to Lanzhou (蘭州)

Day 7: Lanzhou, fly back to Nanjing

THE LOGISTICS:

Transportation

Planning the trip was no easy task, and we overran our budget by a bit. Firstly, to get to Xinjiang you'd ideally want to take a plane. If not, your next best bet is by train and that'll take 2 days of pure masochism. Plane tickets from Nanjing to Urumqi, and then from Lanzhou back to Nanjing, cost almost 500USD alone. Of course, China doesn't have direct flights from these cities, so you'll have to make a layover at Taiyuan, Shanxi and Xi'an, Shaanxi, which is an unwelcome but inevitable reality. Plus the food is worse than Delta's.

In addition, overnight train tickets that originate from another province are near impossible to purchase unless you manage to hire someone to buy them for you there (meaning in Xinjiang or Gansu province). You have to find a local travel agent who has connections to do this for you, otherwise you'll find yourself taking a stinky sleeper bus rather than a comfy overnight train. I managed to confirm all the tickets literally 2 days before the trip... it was stressful to say the least. :(

Train tickets are cheap if you can get ahold of them, with hard sleepers being around 200 yuan (~30USD), and I believe soft sleepers around 350 yuan. The difference between these two is that hard sleepers are 6 to a compartment (3 bunk beds on each side) with no private room that allow you to close the door and shut out the noise. However, China has improved A LOT since the last time I took a sleeper train in 2006. I remember back then all these Chinese people were blowing smoke in your face, spitting ginormous lugies on the floor, pissing all over the bathroom floor. But, this time around the hard sleepers were not only clean, but people were quiet and respectful, there was NO SMOKING ALLOWED (thank you baby Jesus!) and the bathrooms were quite clean (albeit squatters still). So I really recommend traveling via train now, especially if you can overnight it from city to city to save some time. We did 2 overnight rides, and I totally konked out on the 2nd one from Jiayuguan to Lanzhou. Then I woke up and I wasn't in Kansas anymore!

Lodging

We did overnight trains twice so that was our lodging for two nights. We also had a group of four, which was very convenient for sharing rooms and such. At the end, although we had grand notions of ghettoing it up with hostels, we stayed in some pretty nice 3-star hotels at times, which ended up being less than 30USD per night anyway. That's pretty expensive in China standards I guess, but hanging out with a stanky cranky girl is no one's idea of fun. :p Oh but if you ever stay in hotels that are 2-star or lower (which we did a couple times), make sure you know when they turn on the hot water!!!!!!!!!

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This trip went smooth as a baby's butt, and it makes me quite optimistic for my next China plan late November. Thinking about climbing Huangshan (黃山) in Anhui since it's usually teeming with visitors but we have Thanksgiving off. :D

If you ever want to use our Silk Road itinerary as a template, check out this basic schedule posted below, which I laid out while planning. Or if you have any questions about any of the towns that we visited, feel free to reach out to me! The only thing that I would have done differently would be to spend a bit more time Jiayuguan. It also would have been nice to to go to Kashgar too, but it would have taken too much time to get out there and we only had a week. Ah well, I'll just have to save that for another time. ;)