Heading west
If you enjoy this post, please 
subscribe to my RSS feed to automatically receive my latest updates! You can also follow me on Twitter @chinaandbeyond.
When this appears, I’ll be about halfway through a 24-hour train ride from Changsha to Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province. Originally, my plan was to continue from Gansu into Xinjiang and eventually to Kashgar. But after the riots, we scrapped our plan to visit Xinjiang. Instead, we’ll visit a few sites along the Silk Road (Jiayuguan, Dunhuang) and then head down into the Tibetan regions of Gansu and Qinghai.
Rob Gifford, former Beijing correspondent for NPR and the author of China Road, has this to say about my first stop:
Lanzhou was, and is, the end of homogenous, ethnic Chinese China. It is where the tectonic plates of Han China start to grate up against those of Central Asia.
For the next two and a half weeks, my traveling companions and I will be exploring this friction. When I get back, I will have plenty of stories and photos to share here. But I’m not sure how much blogging (much less Twittering) I will be able to do from the road. I’ll post as often as I can, but I don’t want to be glued to a computer. I’m not even bringing my laptop. (Proving that I am not, in fact, a flashpacker.)
Related Posts:
Leave a Reply