Phase Two (aka a RANT about Lanzhuo)

A city never makes a good first impression at 2:30 am when you roll in sober and tired after a 2 ½ hour flight. That first impression doesn’t get any better when you then have a shitty bus ride through the windy soot covered foot hills. Then to be refused by not one BUT 3 hotels on the basis of your skin colour, well then it gets even better. The final straw is then being offered a bed bug filled, shady-off-the- street-back-door deal on the worst hotel room I have EVER seen.

Beautiful Lanzhuo

Petro-chemically smog over the hills of  Lanzhuo

So when we finally got a place to stay that wasn't a s#*thole we all crashed out fairly quickly. Things got even better when we woke up the next morning to the WONDER that is Lanzhuo. The best way to describe this place is this: take Detroit on a very very bad day, then move it to  northern Alberta and white trash it all up, then plunk it down in the middle of china and put nothing around it for miles! The place is described by Lonely planet as “petro-chemically”. So needless to say that the scenery was lacklustre and polluted! We couldn’t even see the near by mountains.

We rallied ourselves and went out for 4 yuan noodles. They were spicy and thick and delicious. After the noodle breakfast we all still felt the need for something breakfast-y so we trekked off to the “Boton” coffee house. (Did they mean to write Boston or did they actually mean Boton? We will never know) Will ordered a chocolate muffin off the Drink menu, and 30 minutes later he was presented with a 3 layer waffle, WTC. Meanwhile Catherine and Paul wanted some Irish coffee. Pretty safe right? Wrong. They were given a wine glass filled with whiskey a shot of coffee, Betty Crocker icing and sprinkles.

Tea in a small noodlehouse

Noodles for breakfast

Coffee with iriish whiskey, icing and sprinkles

We were whisked off to check out the water wheel, which Lonely planet promised us was near the walk way. But apparently they are a bunch of liars. So we checked out the golden animal statues and Morgan tired to get Hep-C off the pig’s belly.

Finally we went to the best place in Lanzhuo. There was a beautiful working Taoist Temple. We wandered around the very peaceful court yard. There were monks who all had really sweet beards and hats. They were giving fortunes and playing sweet drums that looked like Buddha bellies! Catherine was chatted up in broken chinglish for a while (like she was everywhere on our trip!) by a man who took a half hour to tell her that his daughter goes to U of T and he is writing a dictionary.

Taoist temple in Lanzhuo

Catherine making new friends

After the temple tour we split up into 3 teams of two and raced around gathering supplies for the train. Erica and Catherine got dinner from 3 different restaurants. Morgan and Will were on drinks and supplies. Paul and Kristen were on snacks and fruit. We got everything we needed and boarded our overnight train. After some negotiating with some Macbeth Style witches we got all 6 of us into one bunk. We proceed to drink, play cards, eat and hang out. The boys were drunk enough to buy some 3D vinyl pictures of wolves and eagles.  At 10 pm they turned out the lights so we all brushed our teeth and tucked into bed.



Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, Heart,,,, with our powers combined...



Warning: Huang beer may lead to the buying of one of a kind vinyl holograms of wolves and eagles.

We were only 7 hours from Dunhuang, aka the coolest place on earth!

More Lanzhuo

Lanzhuo has one of the largest communities of Muslims of any of the large Chinese cities. The mosques are some of the only beautiful sights in Lanzhuo.