We got into Jiayuguan from Dunhuang around lunchtime, rested for a bit, then went to see the end of the Great Wall!
We got to the park, bought our tickets, and quickly spotted the wall. We quickly realized that the site is completely reconstructed. Everything looks pretty new.
They had a lot of cultural events and reenactments going on.
Some of the wax figures and models were reasonably realistic. Some of them seemed to have anatomical anomalies…
We realized pretty quickly that this was more like an amusement park than a historic site. We basically walked around the wall and fort there. We looked out into the bleak desert that surrounds Jiayuguan.
There wasn’t that much else to do. There are two other sites that are included in the ticket, but we had both already visited the Great Wall, so we weren’t so interested. We were mostly tired, so we just decided to call it a day. We headed back to our hostel.
When we got there, we realized there was no power in the building. We had been planning to just relax and charge up our devices for the journey the next day. Instead, we had 2 dead phones and no wifi. We were worried that we had no alarm clocks to wake us up in the morning for our train at 6am!
We went out while we waited and hoped for the power to come back on. When we went outside, we realized that the whole area was out of power. We walked around for quite a long time and nowhere seemed to have power. We eventually found a decent restaurant that was open. The owned said they could basically only fry rice, because all they had was one gas burner that would work.
We returned to the hostel. Still no power. I decided to just get ready for bed. I got in the shower and resigned myself to a cold shower. Sure enough, after a few minutes in the cold shower, the power came back on. We were relieved. We charged our phones, set alarms, and ordered a cab for 5am. It was a relief after a strange and disappointing day.
After our amazing day the previous day in Dunhuang, Jiayuguan was a bit of a disappointment. We were also really tired from lack of sleep and constant moving for weeks at that point. This was the last day of our travels out west together as well, so I think we were ready to head back east.
The next morning, I woke up to the sound of our taxi driver calling me. I told him where we were, but he didn’t understand me. Even the hostel reception staff had trouble explaining. We did make it in the end to our train back to Lanzhou.
James and I parted ways in Lanzhou. I got off the train and then collected my ticket to get on a 24-hour sleeper train to Shanghai. I caught up on sleep, ate a lot of instant noodles, and watched the arid landscape turn in to mountains, farmland, and eventually the overpopulated metropolis of Shanghai.
