Jiayuguan and the western end of the Great Wall

Xiahe to Lanzhou to Jiayuguan

There aren't any direct buses from Langmusi to Lanzhou, so you have to transfer in Hezuo. Some reports suggest that there are two different stations in Hezuo and that you might have to take a taxi between them, but I was able to transfer at the same station.

Arriving in Lanzhou, I thought I would probably have to transfer stations in order to get a train to Jiayuguan, but one of the drivers in the bus-station courtyard, before I could even make it into the station, said they could take me there. They weren't leaving for a few hours, and it was a night bus, so I left my bag with them and went out to explore the city for a few hours.

Lanzhou didn't make a huge impression on me. I saw an interesting mosque, but like most Chinese cities it seemed to be a temple to capitalism, with modern shopping malls quickly replacing anything that might have looked traditional. And although Lanzhou supposedly has the most polluted air in China, the air there was a lot clearer on both the times I was there than it was when I was in Beijing.

Although I returned about a half hour before the bus was scheduled to leave, apparently I was later than they wanted; when they saw me coming the rushed me onto the bus and we quickly left. This was my first sleeper bus. These buses have three rows of bunks, but you can't lie flat on them, as they have an inclined back and head area, with your feet going into a compartment below the head of the person in front of you. Although they're actually pretty good for sleeping, by the same token they're definitely not designed for people more than 6 feet/180 cm tall.

Typical sleeper bus configuration.

We arrived in Jiayuguan before dawn, which is to say sometime before 6:30 am, and since the bus didn't terminate in Jiayuguan we were dumped on the edge of town where the highway passed by. A taxi delivered us to the center early in the morning, and I wandered around looking for a place to stay. Like Lanzhou, however, nowhere would accept foreigners except for those that charged more than 160 yuan per night. That's too rich for my blood, so I decided to stay the day and take a train that night to Dunhuang. It's both frustrating and unsurprising that China appears not to want many foreigners to see the west of the country, with their crackdowns especially affecting budget tourists who are more likely to interact with locals and less likely to be taking tours.

In order to figure out what I was going to do I again had to rely on a friendly internet cafe to help me get online, and suss out train schedules and how to get to the station by bus. I made my way to the train station, bought the only kind of ticket they had left—standing room on a 3:00 am train—dropped my bag at the left-luggage room, and headed back into town to see if I could rent a bike at the Jiayuguan Binguan. After locating the hotel (there are multiple buildings in the same compound, so finding the right person to talk to was slightly difficult) and finding the right person, I was able to rent a bike. This was great, as biking to the sights was really a great way to see the sights and enjoy the landscape. It's too bad that more places don't rent bicycles in China, as it's a great way to explore and I used to rent bikes in SE Asia all the time. Step up your game, China! Oh wait, I forgot that they don't care about foreigners and no self-respecting, loaded Chinese tourist would ride a bicycle anywhere.

Fort Jiayuguan

Fort Jiayuguan basically marked the farthest western extent of Ming China, strategically located at the narrowest point of the Hexi Corridor, and it's where the Great Wall ended. There are some pretty amazing pictures out there of the fort with snowy mountains in the background, and it's a pretty impressive sight at any time of the year.

There's a park and pond just southeast of the fort. It's surprisingly unkempt for a Chinese park.

As in Dunhuang, tourists can get rides in ultralight gliders to fly over the fort.

Poppies at the base of the wall, from the south.

Jiayuguan Fort is surrounded by an outer wall and an inner wall. The outer wall, which you can see above, is fairly small, but encloses a much larger space than the inner wall. The inner wall is much more massive and encloses a much smaller area.

The inner wall and fort is the small box on the left. The outer wall encloses it, and then all of the green area is the modern park surrounding it, which includes a museum.

Tourists can play dress-up inside the inner wall.

Looking north over the fort and inner wall, which is much more substantial. The restored stretches of the Great Wall are in the mountains back there.