Dunhuang is a city set up for tourism. Brand new train station and airport, a wide, welcoming roadway connecting them to the city’s center, a thriving outdoor city market, open at night, signs in English, food of all types, sand dunes and Buddha caves and even a glacier you can visit, with hotels available in all price ranges, from 5 star down to no stars, spread out in every direction and all very accommodating except for one small detail: all the beds are way too hard. How do I know this? I spent the better part of a morning and afternoon surveying them. This is a fact: Chinese people like hard mattresses, or no mattresses at all, just an inch and a half thick, dense plastic pad covered in a sheet on a metal bed frame. Some hotels I’ve slept in it felt as if I were sleeping on a box spring, covered with a thin pad. This is usual, this is accepted, Chinese travelers expect this. Lest you think I’m a lightweight, I have spent time sleeping on pavement alongside highways, in drainage pipes, on rock ledges, on banks of river gravel, floors, roll out, spine-breaking hotel beds, surfboards, hammocks made out of vines and all manner of collapsed, foamy, guest couches, backseats of cars, a bathtub once, and even on the hood of an abandoned backwoods Buick, as well as so many other bone-bruising places, but these days I really do prefer a nice soft bed. So, after another night spent sleeping on a thinly covered bag of bones, I set out to find a western mattress, armed with the translation software on my tablet. After checking the Internet, I headed for a hotel that promised a soft mattress but it was being remodeled. I soon discovered the info for Dunhuang was way out of date and set out on my own.
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Ancient legends say the area containing the Mingsha or Singing Sand Dunes just south of Dunhuang used to be flat. One day a fierce battle raged there and an army was annihilated, leaving the ground littered with bodies. A Goddess scattered incense ashes over them and from the ground rose up a giant sand mountain to bury the warriors, while the tears of the dead soldiers’ loved ones pooled to form Crescent Lake. Even now, it is said, when the wind comes from a certain direction, military drums rumble, the dunes echo the sounds of battle, the sand blows out sad laments for the fallen and mournful vapors of ghosts, drift. But this day, there was no wind, no battle cries, just sunlight and temperatures in the high 50’s and Xuxiangdong (whose name I shortened to Xu) beckoning me to follow. He led me to the camel ranch and pulled out money to pay for both of us, but I stopped him and paid my own way. I have found this is typical of Chinese generosity. If you are invited, the inviter expects to pay for everything. I guess he thought he had invited me by saying, “follow me, follow me,” and that became the tagline of the day, uttered in an amusing way as one would usher along a clueless child, along with repeating, “good friend, good friend.” I suddenly realized this was the extent of his English. No matter, we were on the same wavelength, everything was making us laugh, everything was blowing us away and we communicated our wonder with double thumbs up, shrieks and whoops of surprise and delight. We were joined by another Chinese tourist straggler and lined up for the camels. The legendary singing sand dunes outside of Dunhuang, China were not singing for me but they were not entirely silent, either. They say the desert sings of lost Silk Road traveler’s ghosts whose lives were taken by bandits or thirst or starvation, though it was mostly by the desert windstorms that rose like waves and extinguished all life that wasn’t smart enough to ride it out, yet all I heard were my own thoughts, desert dry, blooming, beckoning onward over the dunes and into what’s next. |
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