Ed:
I am dizzy. I feel faint. I am pissing evostick. Must ... have ... sprite. I think I am dehydrated.

Apart from this, the desert is great fun! Note the use of the exclamat!on mark, which I believe to be for the sole use of three year old letters (Dear mummy! I am having fun! It is great!! etc. etc. yawn yawn yawn). It really is that fun here. Things Jo and I have done so far in Dunhuang include, bargain and haggle a cheap hotel room, bargain a game or two of pool down to 2p a go, haggle a couple of bikes to the sand dunes, dogde/duck/dive/wheel/deal our way into the sand dune park for free, wangle a trip to the Mogao for 24 yuan and many more money saving devices. This is good as it took 34hrs to get here by train (through some spectacular yellow rivery type valleys and desert) which meant an exhausting night in hard seat, and a 6am rise out of hard sleeper. I appear to be knackered every where we go, but this only seems to make every!thing!more!fun :)

Take the sand dunes for example. The town of Dunhuang is an oasis in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by pebble-and-sand desert. From the distance, all the trees make it look like a forest, and when you enter, all of a sudden one is inside a sort of French looking agricultural community that has been invaded by north-western chinese. To cap the surrealism off (how many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Two, one to hold the giraffe and one to fill the bath with coloured machine tools) the avenue of a high street has a veritable fleet of giant (200m) sand dunes about a mile of the end, creating the complimentary backdrop to the wonderful scrubby chinese town that Dunhuang is. For a mere pittance, one can hire a pair of bicycles, and peddle out of town toward a fenced off park called `Crescent Moon Lake Park', where there are camels and a crescent shaped lake, that the ancient Chinese claim as the birthplace of the moon god (that is a pathetic lie -ed). Chinese International Tourist Service entrance fee? Y20. Gate dodging laowai who don't mind a hard climb fee, Y0, but you get covered in dust.

Apparently it is the done thing to break track just before the park entrance, where one can criss-cross through a maze of little paths in small orchards surrounded by camel stables all the way up to the foot of one of the highest dunes. The sight of these things from a distance is awesome, but when up close, you just have no idea quite how high the monochromic 38 degree slope in front of you ascends (get on with it -jo). So we climbed this thing, it took about an hour, so I suppos it was one of the smaller ones. I suggested to Joanna that we could suppose it was a smaller one, but she said this meant it looked like we could type, so we plumped for suppos and started to [try] and climb. Remember what it was like to try and climb sand dunes? I think this was a first for both of us, and it was very hard work. We adopted a two steps up, one down policy, and began to start small-scale sand slides willy-nilly on our unauthorised journey up what eventually proved to be the biggest of the local dunes, and the least populated (no of people at top in the evening - 0 - no of people who had been up this dune - 0, on that day). It must have been as high as North Hill on the Malverns, and was v. v. v. photogenic).

A few small power cuts marred our evening out, but was excellent all the same, even better given the charming candlight. I still had quite a lot of sand in my ears though. The town is quite ruralised, but still has a town feel to it if one gets stuck into the main streets. There is lots of outdoor pool to be played, and quite a few laowai as well. Everything is hot in the sun, and cool in the shade, and our hotel room is in the shade, which is nice. Before I completely shrivel up, I shall delegate Joanna to regail you with `Tales of 1001 Chinese Caves'.

Jo:
(Actually still Ed, see if you can tell -jo) Hello, my name is Jo, and I like to keep my man happy by buying him Sprite in foreign countries, whose languages I spend years learning in order to aid my man-appeasment purchasing skills.

Pah!! (The three year-old in me delights) please excuse this bit of errant knightery on Ed's part. He has succeeded in mastering precisely 6 words of Chinese, one of which is `fridge' and another of which does not exist, so it is left up to me to do all the `parlay-vooing'.

Boyfriend-bashing aside, today (Friday, having arrived on Thursday and we shall be leaving tomorrow [Saturday]) has been a most satisfactory day as far as `Traveller's Tales of Avoiding Rip-Offs' go, although Ed and I are now expecting to be ivolved in a minicab-related hit-and-run accident any moment now. We decided to go to the caves today and upon consulting the guidebook, thought it would be a doddle ("Simply step onto the street between 8 and 9am and you will be approached by busdrivers who will, for a reasonable price, take you to the caves.") Okay, so it was 9.05, but we thought that we were safe. At 9.30 we started to get pissed off with the guidebook, by 9.45 we had descended to the depths; we decided to hire a cab. Negotiations went well until we got into the cab, whereupon the cabbie turned around and stated that it would cost his original price but this time, per person. So we negotiated again and had just started driving when I saw a minibus also heading caveward. The cabdriver stopped and got out to talk to his mates about something and Ed and I ran over to the minibus leapt in, and confused the busdriver a bit by lying on the seats with our hands covering our heads. We ended up cruising by the cabdriver who stood in the middle of the street waving his fist at us and shouting but we had an otherwise peaceful trip to the caves.

The Mogao caves are the most historically important caves in China, and they also have some of the nation's best Tomb Raider-esque stairways and corridors. Unfortunately our exploration of these lead also to many Tomb Raider-esque locked dors and being followed by a 13 year-old PSB (Police) Officer. The relics in the caves that aren't in the British Museum are still pretty impressive. Ed and I agree that the most bestest bit ever !!! was the 10 storey high Buddha, which was absolutely amazing!!!! The Taiwanese Geriatric Association, whose tour we were tagging along with, seemed to like it anyway.

Off to find some more bargains and play 9 ball.

Ed:
Just a quick note on what happened yesterday. After writing the e-mail, we went back to the hotel and prepared ourselves for a night in the night market. It was about this time that we realised that our train was at 0839 the next day, and we were an hour and a half from the station. Don't Panic. The situation was cleanly resolved however when we were politely informed that the tickets were valid for another 3 days, but only for that buggered 0839 train. What we are going to do is go to the station town tonight and sleep there, then get the train tomorrow. La, la and indeed la.

Night market was fun, in that they do this thing where you can buy food on the trot, or sit down at a private table in a big square where a hostess thing will:

• (a) grumble at you about how little beer you drink (I had 4 pints, and this is at altitude - wahey)
• (b) grumble about how little food you order
• (c) go and get from whatever stall whatever sir would like
• (d) insist that all other laowai are your `friends' and try to get them to sit with you, even when they are from Texas
• (e) overcharge you for their delightful company