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Monday 2004-07-05 - Jiayuguan, China
Catching the train
When we get back to the hotel in Dunhuang a little before noon, there’s just time to check out, put our luggage into the bus, and have a somewhat hasty lunch at John’s Cafe. By 13:00 we’re on the road again, with a very tight schedule: it’s a long way to Jiayuguan, estimated at 5.5 hours, but we must be there before seven to pick up our train tickets.
It’s not a pleasant trip but there’s no way around it: we make only two short stops at gas stations to use the facilities — and a two-minute stop every hour to rotate places in the bus (so we all get our share of being shaken apart on the bumpy road) — otherwise we just move on, and have to. At first we progress fast enough and the driver is able to keep a steady speed of 86 km/hr (according to my GPS) but later there are a lot of road works and our speed goes down a lot. There’s also a lot of grit on the newly-covered stretches, and we see many heaps of glass along the road: broken windshields… It’s a worrying sight, but luckily we have no mishaps: we have no time for that! The atmosphere in the bus is unmistakable: everyone is tense and no doubt some of us think back to the flat tire we had near Kuqa.
All goes well though, and a little before seven we arrive in Jiayuguan where — after no more than a glimpse of the famous Jiayuguan Pass, the largest and most intact entrance of the Great wall — we stop at the bus station. Huh? Our driver goes with our travel companion to pick up the train tickets which turn out to be waiting in a tiny restaurant near the bus station. Then on we go to the train station at the edge of town. We have just 6 minutes to board the train which leaves at exactly 20:38. Lights out at 22:30: now we can relax again.
