Silk Road Adventure: Day 1 Xian to Tianshui

We scheduled our car and two drivers for the 4th of April. The drivers and car arrived to our hotel at around 7 am. The lady who sat us up with the car dropped by and we finished the paperwork to make sure everything was legal. The hotel offered breakfast (Chinese style) for 5 yuan so we all took advantage before setting out on our Silk Road Adventure.

As soon as we left Xian and its surrounding suburbs, we began to see the famous loess plateau. I had heard and read of this plateau since my high school days, so I was especially interested in what exactly it was. Boy, was I not impressed. It looked like just plain old Oklahoma dusty brown dirt to me. We stopped several times along the way for me to take a closer look and it was during this close inspection that I saw that we have nothing like this stuff in Oklahoma. Mixed among the dusty brown dirt particles are all kinds of junk. Small roots and unidentified, none dirt particles which gave it a weird textures. We were told that loess is packed so tight in this area, that people cut caves into the mountains and hills and lived inside these caves. The caves were not that common near Xian but up north in the Yanan area (where the Mao's Long March ended) the locals still use these caves to live in. For more information on this loess plateau, go here (http://www.mindground.net/loess.html).

Tianshui is about a five hour drive from Xian. From what I was able to find out, it is a fairly new town and thriving. The reason anyone goes to Tianshui is to see the famous Buddha images in a strange shaped mountain about fifteen miles outside the city - Meijishan. The road to Tianshui was really bad, construction all over the place. When traveling by car, one must pay a lot of money at toll gates. The trip to Tianshui cost us well over $20 on a road that was little more than a dirt path after we left the freeway. Miserable road and, after five hours of seeing loess, miserable sites. We were all happy to arrive in Tianshui in late afternoon. We had stopped several times for me to check out the loess, make pit stops and eat. The 368Km took us most of the day and we decided to find a hotel at around 3 pm, get cleaned up and go shopping a little. We would go see Meijishan early the next morning and then head out to Lanzhou at around noon.

Hey, it was my birthday! We (two drivers, my wife and I) found a little restaurant about three blocks from our hotel and had a birthday party (of sorts). We located a cake shop next to the hotel and had them make a cake or rather decorate a cake which appeared to be at least two days old. Hey, it is for a party not really to eat? We had a decent dinner and then celebrated by me cutting the cake. How many of you have had a birthday party in downtown Tianshui?

On the way out, we saw a crippled man trying to get onto a chair and so we directed the waitress to give the rest of the cake to this poor unfortunate soul. The waitress laughed and informed us that he was the owner of the restaurant. Oh, well. The cake was terrible anyway.

On the way to the hotel we did make a quick stop to check out a book store which appeared to be selling some really great Chinese painting books very cheap. We spent about an hour browsing through the books on Chinese paintings and others. My wife ended up buying a beautiful set of four full color books at around 200 yuan for the set (about 1000 baht). Nice books!