Day 100, September 4th Hami
The morning was spent at the excellent Turpan museum. It had artifacts dating from 6000 BC including textiles, shoes, clothing and paper with administrative records, financial accounts, laundry lists etc dating from 300 AD, skeletons of dinosaurs, and a demon which was intended to protect graveyards and an impressive collection of mummified remains of humans found at localities in the Turpan Basin.
We then drove through the desert to Hami along a six-lane motorway. The Flaming Hills on the left weren’t exactly flaming and, although we passed within 300 metres of them, they were not as hot as we had expected.
There is a green wire fence about four feet high along the entire stretch of the road from Kashgar to Luoyang which is designed to keep wild camels off the motorway. Must have cost billions to build. We saw a herd of perhaps 12 wild camels, looking rather the worse for wear with their two humps falling over due to lack of water. Difficult to understand what they lived on as the landscape was totally devoid of vegetation.
We drove through the Black Gobi (I think) because the sand and stone is much darker than further west. There were some interesting rock formations created by wind erosion.
