Mom and I stopped in Urumqi on the way north from Turpan, but it was only a stopover point while we met up with fellow traveler and mom's co-worker that we traveled with in Thailand, Becky, before heading out of town to Tianchi Lake. It is still an interesting (though ugly) city, being that in this part of the country, the Chinese population is decidedly less Han and more Uiger (muslim.) First we took our sweet time getting up in the morning and so ended up mis...

Turpan is now up there with Xiahe as the coolest places in China. Well, I use "coolest" figuratively since it is officially the hottest city in the country and the temperature floats around 100 degrees during all daylight hours. Even at night I don't think it even got down to 80. But even with the heat, this city was incredible. It's a small city, but because of all the heat, the main road in town is completely covered in grapevines as respite for...

Dunhuang has some of the best sites on this trip so far, if nothing else, just because they are extremely unique. But first and formost, this is also the most expensive city we've hit yet, the main site (the Mogao Grottoes) costing more for the entrance fee than the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace in Beijing, combined. This tiny city on the edge of the Gobi Desert is more expensive than Beijing! I don't understand it! And from what we've heard about the ...

We are really getting into the NORTH of China now. Mom and I arrived in Jiayuguan a couple days ago on a night train where we did NOT have sleepers. This did not seem so bad when we had done the same thing on a short train ride, but this was a whole different story altogether. We boarded our train and even though we had expressly requested assigned seats (and received them) on our tickets, we still found our seats occupied by a father and his three kids. We s...

This is the most wonderful city! We randomly discovered it in a guide book and kind of just decided to come here for sure when we couldn't get a ticket to our next destination and here we are. Xiahe is just one street long and ends in the Labrang Monastery, the largest Tibetan institution outside of Tibet (though according to the Tibetans who live here, this is still Tibet, even though the 'official' border of the country is quite a ways south of here...