Eddy Chan is not James Bond: 12/3/07 Bleakness and desolation up close and personal

I can totally understand why it was a Chinese citizens worst nightmare to be exiled from China during the Ming Dynasty at the Jiayuguan Fort 嘉峪关城楼. Looking out to the North West from the walls of the fort I could see nothing but huge expanses of desert save for a highway, a railway and some telegraph poles and powerlines to remind myself that I'm in 21st century China. There were also a few camels and horses to imbue tourists with the sense of what a caravan might've looked like in the middle ages.

The fort itself is quite an amazing structure - there are 3 layers of walls laid out in an expansive square with architecture that looks older than that found on the Great Wall at the Beijing end or even the Xian city walls. The bricks used (if the 1986 restoration was authentic) are more earthy in colour with the yellow of the local clay really showing through. The walls themselves are less ornate than the Qing dynasty walls at Beijing too.

We spent a few hours there and also strolled around the Great Wall Museum on the side which I found really cool - contrary to popular belief most of the Great Wall doesn't and never looked like the 'classic' wall near Beijing - most of it is in crumbly ruins now but even in the past, different architecture was used over different dynasties stretching different geographies. It is more than 5000km from Jiayuguan to Shanhaiguan 山海关 which is where the Great Wall meets the sea.

I found it really fun to walk around the fort - there was barely anybody else around (have I already said I love low season travelling?) so it felt like I was on some sort of border patrol during the Ming dynasty. You could totally lose track of the era you're in because of the remoteness and absense of modern markers.

I've also been feasting on the local hotpot over the last couple of nights just to take a break from eating Muslim food. Hugo and I also got wasted in some dodgy upstairs local bar last night on cheap Chinese beer, good idea at the time but todays hangover made it extremely hard to motivate myself to get out of bed and actually go to the fort...at least I enjoyed it though.