July August 2009.pub - Qingdao Expat Group

Three Expat Women tour
Rita Nielsen
Tai Tai Tales of Travel by
S
pring was near and The Tai Tai’s (alias: Julie,
Diane & Rita) were restless. An appetite for adventure
was calling three Qingdao women to the Silk
Road. One might recall Silk Road was known as
“Friendship Canal”. And possibly the meaning was not
only about the trade between the West and the East, but
also interpersonal relationships within one expat tour bus.
My skepticism of traveling with a large group changed
forever.
Twenty-nine international strangers, and a guide provided
by China culture center, eventually find themselves in the
Gobi Desert. (Geologists and ecologists call the Western
Gobi the Tarim Basin and TaklamakanDesert.) We entered
each town, village, cave, mountain, sand dune via Dunhuang
camel, bus, overnight train, airplane, and/or with a
headlamp. Our entire trip was fueled by laughter (another
natural resource indigenous to the area). My only previous
knowledge of this journey was that a Venetian merchant
named Marco Polo and his family were going to be
responsible for my next lesson in Chinese History— silk
carpets and cashmere!
One of the best days of the trip started in Gansu Province
with breakfast on the rooftop of our quasi-sandcastle hotel
in the Gobi Desert. The Dunhuang Silk Road Hotel was
an epic setting for the days that would lie ahead!
The camel ride toward Crescent Moon Lake on “the Rumbling
Sands” of Marco Polo, and the climb to the top of the
dunes was not for weak knees or the faint hearted! The
panorama of Dunhuang stretched out as if it were a Han
dragon pensively watching us in the Hexi Corridor. Waiting
quietly for one or all of us to slide down. (The Hexi Corridor
is a long narrow passage stretching from Lanzhou to
the Jade Pass, or Yumen Gate, also known as Northern
Silk Road in Gansu Province.)
That afternoon, at Mogao Grottos, we toured approximately
10 of the 492 caves housing a total of 45,000
murals, Buddhist paintings and 2,000 terra-cotta statues.
The caves were unlit and better seen by flashlight. No
cameras were allowed. But, what was waiting for us outside
was every photo journalists dream. We were in the
middle of a sand storm! A surreal walk to the bus and the
3.5 hour drive to catch the overnight train to Turpan was
as unnerving as any Nor’easter I had experienced.
In Turpan and Urumqi, Uyghur, Turkic culture and Islamic
religion become more visual. The integration of several
nationalities became apparent in the Xinjiang Uyghur
Autonomous Region. Language, geography and ecology
rapidly change as we continued to move west through the
desert to the mountains and back again.
16 QINGDAO EXPAT MAGAZINE