In the last few weeks work has taken me in to Inner Mongolia Province and out to the Tibetan / Qinghai plateau.
The coal mine we work with in Zhunge'er is only a three to thirty three hour drive - depending on snow, ice, trucks, bicycles, potholes and four legged traffic. This time though I managed to talk the driver in to coming back past the dam on the Yellow river instead of through the villages and past the cement factories on the northern road. He thought that was a good idea so he loaded up his wife and young daughter and decided to make an excursion out of it. A lot of the people here don't travel about too much and this guy was no different. He had lived in Zhunge'er with his family for a long time and this was his first time to the dam as well. When we got there the camera came out in typical Chinese fashion so there are some photos of me this time instead of the interesting things to look at.
My trip out to a gold mine in western China was an interesting one. I left Shuozhou on the thursday morning to fly from Taiyuan to Xi'an, then pick up another flight out to Dunhuang that afternoon. I got to Xi'an but my pack stayed in Taiyuan so we had an interesting time at the lost luggage counter. I was just lucky I wasn't the only one without my toothbrush. That gave me an overnighter in Xi'an and another chance to check out the moslem quarter markets. Always good for a look around and to practice a bit more Putonghua.
The trip out to Dunhuang was uneventful until the sand dunes came into view and we got thrown around in some pretty serious turbulence. To the north is the Gobi desert then a range of sand just to the south of the highway with snow covered peaks at 5000m to the south of that. The altitude of the mine was 3500m and apparently the oxygen content is down to 60% of sea level air ... and it hit me. The first morining I woke up with a headache that just exploded by mid mmorning, but by that afternoon and about 20 litres of water it was all good again.
I got to have a look around another very different site, saw some more weird and wonderful sights, kept getting saluted by security, and after two days and only just being acclimatised it was back to the lowlands.
Getting set for a run out to Mongolia four hours drive north west of Ulaanbataar next week to visit two sites that are keen to get to know us. Then there's a week in Weihai renewing visas, work permits and hopefully getting the Chinese license sorted and home to catch up with as many as possible.
See you soon
