Team T International 2.0: Team T Travels to the Silk Road

After roughly 24 hours of sleeper train travel, we have arrived at the Silk Road, in an oasis city of Dunhuang between the Taklamaken and Gobi deserts.
After arriving into town and chatting with fellow travelers on the bus from the train station, a dumpling house caught our eye and, as dumplings are traditional a breakfast food and we will eat dumplings any hour of the day we settled in for a nice brunch. Justin, Nick and Michele also sampled donkey dumplings, as we had recently learned this type of meat is a local specialty.
Though the city of Dunhuang is way bigger than anything we have in our home state, it had a nice downtown feel. So after exploring around a bit, we settled into a nice courtyard in the night market and had a small lunch and wrote postcards home.

It was a bit of a challenge locating our hostel. Michele had gotten the address and Justin had translated it so a taxi driver could understand it. As we drove out of the beautiful downtown, Nick and I crossed our fingers that our hotel would be near the dunes. Our driver just kept driving farther and farther into the plentiful vineyards and humble farmers huts. The hotel was unmarked and looked nothing like the picture. We checked in with the help of the woman running the little store next door and we wondered if we were even at a hostel, never mind the one we had booked. The hostel does have three resident dogs who are very friendly and lovable, jujubes we are encouraged to pick and enjoy, as well as a herd of sheep and a billy goat.
Later in the afternoon Justin, Nicholas and I went off to see what was happening near by. We walked down a dusty path where you could see the vegetation of our oasis completely come to a halt in an ocean of sand. We noticed after a few moments that we were in a graveyard, complete with tombstones covered in Chinese inscriptions and burial mounds. After a long stretch of flat sand and rock the dunes towered like mountains in the distance. We watched farmers come and go from where the were drying their grapes into raisins along the tombs and we spotted evidence of camels.
We will be here for six days and will make a point to keep everyone up to date on our sand adventures!