Jia Yu Guan

When I woke in the train, the day was breaking. Looking out the window, the change in landscape was very clear: a flat land and apparently very dry. The Sun was still surrounded by the morning mist and we could not see what was in the horizon.


We arrived to Jia Yu Guan an hour later. From what the guide told us, it is a relatively new city. Founded in the 50s around a steel mill and populated by people that moved from the crowed regions of the East. There was not much more here before that. Well, that's not completely true. This region was famous for the castle that guarded the western end of the Great Wall, which we visited shortly after arriving (but that is something for the future). It's a city located near a small oasis, I believe, but the water comes from the Snow mountains (Qilian), which lie some tens of kilometers from there.

As usual for a new city, JiaYuGuan has a square grid of wide avenues, big squares, many communist style buildings, very similar and ugly, more or less horrible factories, modern sculpture strewn on parks and squares, not much traffic, and a population of about 200000 people. It is fairly extended, too. You'd better have a bike, or take a taxi, which are very very cheap for our standards, and that's taking into account how cheap are taxis in Taipei, or you will never get anywhere walking. There is some commercial activiy in the central part, not too much, but there are quite a few shops, and some "night market", miserable compared to the exhuberance of the ones in Taiwan. Traffic is also chaotic, but since the city is small and there are not so many cars as in Lanzhou it doesn't seem so.


Our hotel was in the southern side, a little to the outer parts, but not too far from the commercial center, near the city hall building. There were some sports facilities nearby, such as a football stadium and some artificial and quite big lakes. The walk we had there one evening was very nice.




Of course, the Olympics paraphernalia was everywhere.


I also saw very poor and unkempt neighboords, probably near the dirtiest factories. The differences in wealth, in the building quality, the maintenance of everything, are something that really jumps out at you in what I saw of China.

In short, a place where you probably would not like to spend too much time, but we found out several places where to have dinner or something to drink, and get away from the hotel, which was getting boring amazingly fast.