Monthly Archives: July 2012

We started off our day with a breakfast of champions, a bowl of beef noodles! I don’t know how they do it, but the noodles in the northwest taste SO good. Something about the freshly strung noodles, to the bowl of piping hot soup, it’s just soooo good.

We headed over to the tomb sites of 3th century China. The area has over 100 tombs, but so far only 18 has been excavated and 1 is available for tourists to view. It was incredibly cool taking steps down into the tomb, as it was extremely quiet but also amazed at the fact that the structure is still intact after over 1700 years!! The tomb itself was small, but had three separate small rooms decorated with paintings depicting life back in the day, it even had one for barbecuing meat!
Cool story: The first tomb was discovered by a shepherd walking his sheep, when he accidentally fell into a tunnel dug by tomb thieves!!

Next stop, we headed over to Jiayu Gate (嘉峪关), the gate of which the city was named. Being the western end of the Ming dynasty Great Wall, it was one of the entries into China for the Silk Road. And when the King said “Banish them to the outskirts” as punishment for whatever reason, this may be the last gate they’d leave from before entering the wilderness and probably left to die. Inside the walls, a gleaming city with all you’d need, but outside the walls is not a friendly sight. Mountains to your left and right, winds gusting across the plains with sand blowing into your face. The place is a bit touristy, but if you ignore the tourists and realize the historical significance of this gate, it’s actually pretty cool.

 Long bus day today, after a 5hr 166km bus ride (extremely bumpy and slow), we made it back to Zhangye so we can catch the next bus to Jiayuguan. We made a stop over to KFC to get a taste of fast food. Both of us are a bit tired of noodles and similar tasting food, so we try to stop for some familiar foods whenever we get a chance to!
Fact: McDonald’s does not exist in the northwestern part of China, as it has not reached the GDP-per-capital required for the corporation….but not too low for KFC!! Also, KFC in China has a lot of cool stuff like corn on the cob, bubble tea, custard tarts and even burritos!

So leaving one city at 7:15am and arriving at our destination at 6:45pm, we finally checked in and headed over to the local market for some famous grilled skewers and iced cold apricot tea (delicious!).

A market full of BBQ!.. and warm beer

 Waking up, the clouds overcast the skies again but didn’t really stop us! We headed out in the morning to watch the shepherds herd the horses from all around the valleys to drink water. We met up with our guide for the day, a calm and cool guy who grew up in the area and started riding horses since he was young.

For some reason, everyone that’s ever ridden horses during vacation, they always have bad experiences. NOT AT ALL. We rode two purebred Shandan horses that were about 5years old, which is the optimal age for horses as they’ve matured enough to have endurance, and won’t have poor temper. Somehow though, my horse still won’t listen to me very much and would always veer off course… Apparently I was being too gentle with the little guy, and after learning the ropes (literally), things got very exciting!

Riding through grass plains, mountain valleys and rocky roads, we ran into herds of yaks, crossed rivers and even did a bit of fast paced gallop next to the water reservoir. The galloping though, definitely created a lot of bum-to-saddle smashing…. but not as bad as the stories I’ve heard!

When we got back to base camp, we found out the horses were going through a insemination procedure to breed the next generation of horses. I bet some of you guys might’ve seen it on Dirty Jobs, and I can guarantee you it is definitely a dirrrrrty job, but extremely interesting! We were joined by a group of 5^th year Vet-students that flew all the way from Guangzhou to learn about the process. Viewers discretion, the following may be a bit graphic.

After watching all this, we went into town for some free-range organic yak milk yogurt! Good stuff!

Artificial Insemination

The shepherds herded a group of 12 or so mares (female horse), with their bums facing everyone. This old guy with a white lab coat comes in, with a towel in the left and this pink plastic glove that covers all the way up to his shoulder…. well, that’s because next he eases his hand into the horses anus, goes shoulder-deep in and pulls up a big pile of poop! He repeats the process, and apparently he’s trying to feel for a small bump to see if the horse is ready already pregnant, ready to receive, or needs a couple more days. After doing all 12 horses, they brought out the guns. The camp had a few seed stallions, and this little guy was led into this room where a mare was already there waiting to ‘seduce’ the stallion (ha ha!). Once the stallion is ‘ready’ and mounted, this guy takes a tube the size of a supersoaker 2000 to collect the ‘seed’. After that is all scientific, we got into a sterilized room with a heater (note: I’ve never even seen a heater the whole time I’ve been here in the northwest) to keep the semen above 18C, and do some tests in terms of concentration, volume and health of little guys. We pretended to be vet students and asked a few questions, learned a bit about horses and breeding them…. Wonder if this would ever come useful in the future.

We headed back into the city of Zhangye, and found a European-themed coffeeshop with WiFi! Stuck around for a few hours drinking espresso and eating 煲仔饭as we couldn’t get our bus tickets yet. Strange note, the bus leaves at 1:00pm, but the ticket agents weren’t aware if any buses were available until 12:30pm? Fortunately for us the bus did come today, and we got this brand new spanking bus that had leather seats, and a working clock! Over the past couple weeks, we’ve been on 8 separate buses, and all of them were pretty dirty, run down. One common feature was that, they all had clocks at the front of the bus, but they all don’t work!

Fortunately, the bus was comfortable because the ride was ridiculously not. The distance from the bus station to the camp was only 166km, and we drove well over half of that in less than 2 hours. However, everything went bumpy after that and the remaining 80kms took well over 3hours! The road was so bumpy, people started throwing up in the bus….gross. Again, on the way into the camp we drove past some amazing scenery, rolling hills with herds of horses galloping around. We also saw the real life version of the “Windows” home screen!!

Ironically, the “windows” is dirty.

 Once we got into the camp, it was even more surprising as the “town” of the camp was extremely small, and looked like a shell of its former self. Background information, this place used to be China’s largest camp for horses in the 19^th century, and there were tens of thousands of horses running around and a total of FOUR camps. Now, only camp 1 is open and a few thousand horses left, and not many people are around. Surprisingly, somehow the government built a hotel to accommodate guests of the camp, and was also ridiculously clean but cheap – and it has 24 hr hot water to shower (no kidding, that’s a luxury!!)!

I’ve heard some baaaad stories about horse riding (it involves the rider’s bum and the verb, smashing), but I really can’t wait for tomorrow to see for myself!!

We managed to see one thing before leaving Qilian, and that was the sunrise at the top of the mountain. We managed to find a taxi driver willing to take us up there at 5:30am, so instead of charging the usual $40 RMB, he requested an additional $10 RMB. So for the cost of a coke in a North American vending machine, I made someone wake up 3hours before usual work time! Score.

The view up there is AMAZING. Can you imagine, ice capped mountain ranges, with exposed red soil, over-layed with patches of golden yellow fields?? Unfortunately, the clouds didn’t cooperate again and we didn’t really see much of the sun. The scenes were quite amazing, and a lot of photographers were already there waiting by the time we got there in the dark at 5:45am.

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