After finishing up his bike tour, Rick and I dumped his bike off with the Chinese family he stayed with one night between Linxia and Xiahe. Although their house was compact, it was clear this country family was not so bad off. They had a TV, electricity, a sturdy house and a shrine to Mao -- including a massive poster of the late Communist leader.

Nonetheless the woman of the house (she was the only one there when we dropped off the bike) seemed very happy to be receiving such a gift. It was the last thing we had to do before getting on a bus to Lanzhou, and then a train to Dunhuang. (In between all of this I ran into a girl -- Christina Harvey -- who I interned with five years ago at the Nevada Appeal. It IS a small world).

After about 24 long and painful hours of travel, we arrived in Dunhuang a little beat up. Rick was sick and I just wanted a shower.

While Rick convalesced in our hotel room (which we paid extra for to have 24-hour hot water), I wandered around Dunhuang and was not very impressed. It was disappointing the way many Chinese cities are disappointing -- faceless, with lots of white tile architecture. It was strangely quiet, which was nice, but had been overtaken by huge tourist hotels and buses carrying people to the Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang's claim to fame.

The next day Rick was feeling better, so I dragged him along to the grottoes, which was the only reason I actually wanted to stop in Dunhuang. I studied a bit of Asian art history in college, and had wanted to see the caves, with their buddha statues and cave paintings created over centuries, at Dunhuang since I arrived in China.

Let me first say that the caves were worth the trouble of getting to them -- Dunhuang's somewhat out-of-the-way location, the high cost of entry tickets, and the complete pain it was to get into a tour group.

At the ticket counter was a wonderfully written sign in English that said we could pay 20 yuan extra to get an English guide (on top of the 100 yuan entrance fee). But when we went to buy the tickets, the women at the counter told us there was no English guide today, despite all the white faces we had seen pass us on our way past the souveneir stands.

We didn't care, though an English guide would have been prefered, we just wanted to see the caves before we had to leave for Turpan. So we joined a Chinese group, totally disregarded the commentary, which I couldn't have understood unless I had taken 10 years of university Chinese classes.

We saw caves from a few different dynasties, including one very famous cave that housed thousands of manuscrips and scrolls that have been very important to silk road scholars. In most of the caves, the buddhas had been formed out of a clay and were generally displayed in a carved out area of each cave. One cave had a huge square pillar, each side of the pillar adorned with a different buddha statue. Despite some pillaging of some of the cave paintings (by an American no less) the paintings were amazingly well preserved.

The last three caves were perhaps the most stunning because of the sheer size of the figures. One buddha reached over 30 meters in height, and another was 26 meters tall. The last cave was of a sleeping buddha, being protected by 100 arhats.

Surrounding Dunhuang is perhaps the most desolate landscape I have ever seen. A few sand dunes surround the city, an oasis of farm land, but if you go a bit further, the land is simply flat, with a few bushes scattered here and there. When you get close to Liuyuan, the town where the train stops, black craggy hills rise out of the desert. But there are no trees, and Liuyuan is most definitely not an oasis.

We boarded our train to Turpan with a roudy group of business men on a 9-day tour of Gansu and Eastern Xinjiang provinces. They were from Nanchang, Jiangxi, and were very excited to talk to the foreigners. One of the men spoke a tiny bit of English, but much of that evening ended up being a test of my Chinese skills. It felt pretty good to finally feel like I could communicate with people in Chinese, although it also showed me how little of this language I know.

Then men gave us their business cards (Rick gave them his, which they studied and asked questions about for 15 minutes), shared their food with us, showed us maps of where they lived and places they had been. They were all wearing the same red and white baseball caps and what I call the "Chinese man suit" -- short-sleeved "polo" shirts in navy blue or brown, black slacks and cheap black leather shoes that you can buy anywhere in this country, including supermarkets and hardware stores. They were very sweet and welcoming. It was one of our best train experiences.

After not too much sleep on the train, we arrived in Turpan at 4:30 a.m. and bought tickets to Kashgar for that evening. (Yes, the ticket office was actually open). Soon would begin our whirlwind trip through Turpan, in the blazing hot sun....