We freshened up on Friday morning after a long train ride at our locate hotel in Zhongwei (population of about 100,000, which is "small" enough not to register on a Chinese map when there are nearly 100 cities of over 1 million people). We discovered the quickly that the city was not the tourist attraction, but WE instead were the tourist attractions. Zhongwei probably isn't visited very often by Westerners. The Chinese probably have not seen too many of us to often, so this group of five are quite the oddity in the city. The older population in particular had a fascination with us as we got total stares and all eyes were upon us as we made the brief walk to our hotel (no hostel this time). I, being the only male in the group, get an entire room to myself at each stop. That's a pretty nice luxury since I can dump the entire contents of my 40+ pound backpack and 10 pound daypack all over the room.
We cleaned up and had lunch. Again, we had some locals peering into the window initially when we were seated to see this fascinating creatures huddled around the table. Our meal was hot pot. I had no idea what hot pot was before today. It's essentially a big table with a stove in the middle and a big pot of water and some really good food is dumped inside to cook. Ours was loaded up with lamb, beef, lotus flower roots, some green stuff that was good, bamboo shoots, among other things. It was very good. I'm getting better with my chopsticks. My friends, Haiyi and Joel, will know how honorary Chinese I am if I can prove my chopsticks worth when I return.
When this had our local taxi guide and driver take us out into the desert for a view of the desert landscapes and a view of the Yellow River. We are far inland so the mightly Yellow River is not quite so mighty from here, but it is still powerful. It is the second longest river in China and holds an unimaginable quantity of silt from the desert and other places (not to mention the pollution as well).
We took a sheepskin raft float trip for a few miles down the Yellow...Class I only. The sheepskin raft was a rickety framework of "sticks" held together and floating on top of several "balloons" of sheepskin podlike things. You'll have to look at the pictures to get an idea. Let's just say we had a day to kill today.
We then visited a local outdoor amusement desert(ed) theme park. The Chinese had this brilliant idea recently to invest money in this area to help bolster their economy. Maybe it was stimulus money or a government earmark but the brilliant idea was to built some tourist infrastructure to bring people out into the sticks...er...sand to visit. I'm not sure if this park was a result, but the results were pretty humorous. The Chinese have built this little desert-like park with gates and turnstiles and attendants and a complete staff to man it...and yet there is hardly anyone there. They called it a 5-AAAAA tourist attraction. I suggest they stick to promoting their ancient cultures. They had dune buggy rides in the "park" (pay extra). They had camel rides (extra), which we are already doing tomorrow anyway. There were safari rides on top of jeeps and ATVs (extra) on top of the fees you already paid to enter and walk on the sand dunes. The worst part is that at each station you were greeted by Chinese attendants in military desert camo and ladies in blue hotel-like suits that would try to talk you into trying out each of the new different adventures.
I tried the buggy ($6) and got to ride for about 3-4 minutes covering two laps of their park. I wasn't about to try more.
The other side of the park had a chairlift descent down the dunefield to the Yellow River where other "attractions" awaited and there was also a zipline descent to the river along with a bungee tower. We left!
It was an interesting couple of hours trying to figure out what we had just seen. Proof that we didn't miss much..there were no tour buses of Japanese tourists pulling up to snap pictures of this AAAAA attraction in the outskirts of the Gobi Desert.
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