We left for our tour of the Northern Silk Road route via Hong Kong on Friday, May 7, 2004. We flew our typical route, Houston to Minneapolis to Tokyo to Hong Kong. We arrived in Hong Kong at 10:30 p.m. Saturday, May 8 proceeded to our hotel, checked in and went to our room to rest for the night.
The next day, Sunday, May 9, we ate a lunch buffet at the Intercontinental Hotel with Kalais family. After lunch we decided to visit the Golden Hair Keung and did so. Last we went shopping to the "womans street" as Kalai calls it and purchased a hat and some sunglasses. As Hong Kong temperatures and environment are so similar to our hometown South of Houston, the bright sun, heat and humidity are tremendous during late Spring and Summer therefore requiring the appropriate gear to combat these conditions.
On Monday, May 10, we flew to Xi'an, the capital of the Shaanxi province in the Southern part of the GuanZhong Plain. Xi'an is a large city dating back 3,100 years and enduring 13 dynasties of Chinese rulers. It has tremendous cultural and historical relevance and includes many historical places, artifacts and religous importance. Upon arrival, we went to our hotel, the Hyatt Regency, checked in and decided to visit a few places before retiring for the night. We visited the Wild Goose Pagoda, a structure dating back to 652 AD, during the Tang Dynasty, and the Shannxi Provincial History Museum.
Tuesday, May 11, we began by walking around several places in Xi'an. Next, we visited the city's HuaQing Hot Springs, a museum of paintings and then the Terra Cotta Warriors and their associated workshop.
On Wednesday, May 12, we had some leisure time in the morning and walked around the city for a bit. Later that day, we checked out of our hotel and flew to DunHuang, a city of 100,000 people in the Gansu Province in Western China. This was the starting city of our tour of the Silk Road. Upon arrival, we checked into our hotel, the Sun Grand.
On Thursday, May 13, we explored the Mogao Grottoes, the Mingsha Shan Sand Dunes, a traumatic site for KaLai as it was a long high climb to the top and once there was an astounding view to the bottom, where we had a tiring yet fun experience involving sliding down the dung on wooden sleds, and the Crescent Moon Lake and the Echoing Sand Mountian
The next day, Friday, May 14, we travelled to the White Horse Pagoda and the Ancient City. Later that day, we boarded a train to Turpan or Tulufan.
After an overnight ride on the train, we arrived in Turpan, a city further West on the Silk Road in the province of Xinjang, at 5:05 a.m, Saturday, May 15.. Turpan is a city of 400,000 people. After checking into the hotel, we visited the ancient city of Gaochang and then proceeded to the Bizaklik Thousand Buddha Caves. From there we visited the Astana-Karakhoja Ancient Tombs and then on to the Ancient City of Jiaohe and lastly the Emin Minaret.
Sunday, May 16, we explored the Karez water well system and then drove to Urumuqi, a city also in the Xinjiang province. The drive to Urumuqi took approximately 3 hours. Upon arrival, we visited the Red Hill Mountain Park. As is our tradition, we always seem to have some sort of health problem and this was our place this time. One of Kalai's eyes kept tearing up and did not feel right so we proceeded to the local hospital where they found a spot, of what we guess was sand, in her eye. After irrigating and removing the spot, Kalai felt much better but we felt it best to rest for the night and "take it easy". Believe me, Kalai is not the only one to have problems on our trips as I have had my share of problems also. It always makes things interesting and memorable and, as long it is not serious, is a tradition.
On Monday, May 17, we went to Tian Chi or Heavenly Lake. The view on and around Heavenly Lake definitely lives up to its name! The lake is high in the mountains surrounded by snowcapped peaks and containing clear, cold water. It is another one of those things that we will never forget. From there we went to the local museum, the Xinjiang Regional Museum and lastly a bazaar .
The following day, Tuesday, May 18, we flew back to Xi'an and then on to Hong Kong, checking back in to the BP International Hotel
On the 19th of May, a Wednesday, we shopped for some sneakers for myself and had Dim Sum with the Kalais' parents and her younger sister, KaShu to finish up the day.
A few day before our trip was to finalize, Thursday, May 20, we shopped for a camera lens for our SLR camera and then went to eat some seafood at the Sai Kung with Kalais' elder sister, Ka Pik and her parents.
Friday, the 21st of May, we went to Mongkok to get a camera lense, a case for the camera and a UV filter finishing up our stay in Hong Kong/China for 2004. We said our goodbyes' and went back to the hotel.
On our final day, Saturday, May 22, we checked out of the BP International, took a taxi to the airport and boarded a plane back to the USA via, you guessed it, Tokyo and Minneapolis. We arrived in Houston at around 5:00 p.m., drove home, threw our luggage in the guest bedroom and flopped down our good home furniture and rested for quite a while.
The trip was long but we saw and experienced many wonderful, historical, archeological and grandois places and events and were able to see Kalais' family again. It was great and we look forward to another multicultural, international trip bouncing through Hong Kong on the way.
Dunhuang, a small city in Gansu Province , is located near the crossroads of the ancient Silk Road . It is made famous largely by the Buddhist Grottoes, known as the Mogao Grottoes, which are one of the world's most important sites of ancient Buddhist culture. The grottoes, also known as Caves of the Thousand Buddhas , preserve nearly a thousand years of Buddhist cave-temple architecture, clay sculpture, mural paintings, and manuscripts, dating from the 5th to the 14th centuries.
T he rediscovery of the caves and their treasures in 1900 opened a new field of study that uses the monuments and documents found at Dunhuang to illuminate the complex cultural interactions of ancient Central Asia . The Dunhuang finds reflect periods of Chinese, Tibetan, and Uygur control, and the images and texts reveal the impact of many other Asian regional styles and languages. The intermixture of Indian, West Asian, Central Asian, and Chinese elements reveal a dynamic, eclectic, and thoroughly multicultural context that had a profound impact on the later development of narrative literary forms as well as on Buddhist image-making. This early internationalism has an echo in the contemporary distribution of Dunhuang material and Dunhuang studies around the world. The discovery of a sealed-up library of manuscripts and painted scrolls at the Mogao Grottoes led to the acquisition of significant collections of such portable items by museums and libraries in London , Paris , Leningrad ( St. Petersburg ), and New Delhi .
T he Mogao Grottoes are carved into desert cliffs overlooking a river valley about 25 km southwest of Dunhuang. The caves vary enormously in size, from tiny single-room cells that served as living quarters for individual monks to huge, cavernous worship halls housing monumental sculptures and mural cycles. The caves honeycomb a 1,600-meter-long cliff face running north and south, and contain some 2,000 clay sculptures and more than 45,000 square meters (484,000 sq. ft) of mural paintings. The soft stone in the region is unsuitably brittle for carving, so the sculptures are primarily made of clay, coated with a kind of plaster surface that allowed finishing details to be painted on or engraved.
O f the 1,000 or so caves cut between the foundation of the site in 366 AD and the last efforts in the 14th century Yuan period, 492 are still more or less well preserved. All have been subjected to some degree of various kinds of damage or indignities, from the long term erosion of wind and water, to the smoke from fires built by bivouacked troops . The damages have also stemmed from the modern perils of mass tourism, where the moisture from the breath of crowds of visitors can damage delicate murals that have survived for centuries in the dry desert climate. Ongoing restoration efforts are underway to preserve the caves and their contents. The Dunhuang Research and Exhibition Center , as part of that effort, has constructed replicas of some of the most important and representative of the Mogao Caves . Visitors can study full-scale replicas of the caves and their sculptural and painted contents close-up and under excellent lighting conditions, without danger of adding to the deterioration of the originals. Read more about Dunghuan!
The small and economically insignificant town of TURPAN ( Tulufan to the Chinese), China has in recent years turned itself into one of the major tourist destinations of Xinjiang. Credit for this must go largely to the local residents, who have not only covered all the main streets and walkways of the town with vine trellises, converting them into delightful shady green tunnels (partly for the benefit of tourists), but have also managed to retain a relatively easy-going manner even in the heady economic climate of modern China. In summer the weather is reputedly the hottest in China - the dry heat is so soporific that there is little call to do anything but sleep or sip cool drinks in outdoor cafés with other tourists. This may not be what you came to China for, but quite a lot of people appreciate it by the time they reach Turpan. To ease the consciences of the indolents, there are in addition a number of ruined cities and Buddhist caves in the countryside around the city, testimony to its past role as an important oasis on the Silk Road . Bear in mind that Turpan is very much a summer resort, however; if you come out of season (Nov-March), you will find it chilly and rather miserable.
Turpan is also an agricultural oasis, famed above all for grapes . Today, virtually every household in the town has a hand in the grape business, both in cultivating the vines, and in drying the grapes at the end of the season. Every house has its own ventilated brick barn, usually on the roof, the best spot for catching the hot desiccating winds that sweep through the area. Turpan is located in a depression eighty metres below sea level, which accounts for its extreme climate - well above 40°C in summer, well below freezing in winter.
Today, Turpan is a largely Uigur-populated area, and, in Chinese terms, an obscure backwater, but it has not always been so. At the time of the Han dynasty, the Turpan oasis was a crucial point along the northern Silk Road, and the cities of Jiaohe , and later Gaochang (both of whose ruins can be visited from Turpan), were important and wealthy centres of power. From the ninth to the thirteenth century, a rich intellectual and artistic culture developed in Gaochang, resulting from a fusion between the original Indo-European inhabitants and the (pre-Islamic) Uigurs. It was not until the fourteenth century that the Uigurs of Turpan converted to Islam.
The Town
For some travellers, the real draw of Turpan is its absence of sights, enabling total relaxation. The downtown area doesn't amount to much more than two or three quiet and fairly car-free streets, protected from the baking summer sun by vine trellises.... Read more about Tulufan!
Urumqi , the capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, is situated at the northern foot hill of the snow-capped Tianshan Mountains .
Urumqi , meaning "fine pasture" in Mongolian, was first inhabited by a mixture of ethnic groups about 3,000 years ago. Since the northern route of the Silk Road passed through the city , it was a heavily guarded fort in the Han Dynasty, and remained so for many centuries. Today, the city itself has few historical sites to offer tourists, except for the museum of the autonomous region that houses some valuable relics unearthed along the Silk Road . An excursion to Tianchi, however, is worthwhile.
Tianchi, or “ Lake of Heaven , ” is about 30 miles southeast of Urumqi , at an elevation of 6,435 f ee t above sea level. It is a beautiful highland lake, flanked by rugged pines and cypresses, and with clear waters that reflect the surrounding mountains. In winter, it provides an ideal alpine skating rink. In fact, China 's winter skating games have been held there. Read More about Urumuqi!