On Saturday morning the alarm woke us at 10 am. It seemed as if we had just got to sleep, but we dragged ourselves out of bed, showered, and set off for breakfast. The only thing we found was the hotel restaurant which although lovely, was expensive, and only sold Chinese food. It was difficult to come up with something suitable but we ended up with black tea and some little cake-like buns with honey. They served a lovely “steaming cloth” (a jaycloth!) for your face and hands but charged 1 yuen for it!! After breakfast, we checked out of our room and took the Truck into the centre of town.
Golmud (meaning “river”) is a city of about 200,000 built at 2,802 meters. It’s the third largest in the Tibetan Plateau after Xining and Lhasa. Around the city there are 20 salt lakes, and it therefore abounds with natural resources resulting in lots of industry including salt lake chemicals, potassium, magnesium, salt, natural gas, and minerals including gold, copper, jade, precious stones, lead and zinc. Other important industries are petro-chemicals, oil refineries and gas fields. The 2001 GDP totaled 2.215 billion yuen, a rise of 31.9% over 2000. Golmud is planned to become “China’s Salt Lake City.”
We only had a couple of hours to explore the city and what we saw was fun, despite Lonely Planet saying that you only go there if you are “an engineer or an escaped convict.” We wandered around the centre square which had massive floral displays all in pots, some sort of weird “ghost mountain” structure which some of the kids said was for babies (could be a translation disconnect!!) so, we assumed some sort of kiddies rides; a pond on which people took out paddle boats. We saw a roller blade ring, and one level down covered by large umbrellas were hundreds of poole tables with snooker tables in little rooms around the poole tables. It was amazing, we have never seen so many poole tables all in once place. Walking around was like being in a large city in the states with huge advertisement bill-boards. The roads were wide, in some cases tree-lined avenues. The people were so friendly it was amazing. They couldn’t speak English but could say “hello” and we spoke to old and young, male and female, waved to the little kids and generally felt very welcomed. I said to Ray: “We went to the square to site-see, but everyone was gazing at us!!” At least the “gaping” is neutral! I don’t think they see many western tourists here! Everything was in Mandarin and none of the signs in English. After our quick city-tour, we went into Dicos (the equivalent of McDonalds) and had a chicken burger (actually chicken breast which you could eat and no bones) and chips and coke. Mmmm, delicious!!! Then we grabbed a cab with Leon and Natalie whom we had met in Dicos back to the hotel and the Truck.
Around 2:30 p.m we said goodbye to everyone on the second truck “Suzette” including Dan and Zoe and left Golmud on a beautifully hot sunny day for the desert and a bush camp. The scenery is now totally changed. There is a mountain ridge on the horizon on one side of the road but the rest of the scenery is absolutely flat – yellow-brown sand topped with gravel. There are small waist-high bushes in some parts but in others there is nothing. After about two to three hours driving, we pulled off the highway, which is now smooth and paved, and drove about 3 – 5 kms in the desert only getting semi-stuck twice when we all got off the Truck and walked a bit. It was a beautiful camp-site, in the middle of the desert with a ridge of mountains about 3 kms behind us. It was also warm till it got dark around 10 pm, but even then it was no where near as cold as what we had just come through. We cut down one of the scrub bushes and lit a fire around which all of us, minus 1 person, sat and talked, told jokes, etc. until we went off to our tents and bed.
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