The first two hours of the day consisted of driving painfully slowly through Zhangye, a huge industrial city which is growing very rapidly and high-rise blocks are springing up in all directions. The double track roads are being transformed into motorways with numerous diversions. However once out of the town the road was a most pleasant improvement on the motorways. It was lined by weeping willows and white birch trees, similar to silver birch but white. We passed the “Gansu Silk Road Solar Power Station” with several miles of solar panels and an adjacent factory making photovoltaic cells and panels. There were numerous “tent houses” for vegetables at the side of the road with baked mud walls, a polyethylene roof and mudbrick entrances with pictures and slogans painted on them. Beautiful fields with orange, purple, red and white flowers were cultivated for the manufacture of herbal tea. During our first coffee stop, I saw a man picking something from a field and, going to have a look, noticed a number of small, black and very heavy stones. I picked one up and kept it.
Climbing into the Qilian mountain range and crossing from Gansu into Qinghai Province, we negotiated the first mountain pass above the snow line and descended to the small town of Erbau. The small black stones were being sold to tourists from stalls in the centre of the town. There was also a sweet potato cooking device and many stalls selling tourist tat. A statue depicted Marco Polo leading camels (he is thought to have passed this way during his journey to Beijing because Erbau was an important staging post on the Silk Road) and another statue showed a Red Army General (looking like Lin Piao who gets much of the blame for the Cultural Revolution) and a Tibetan to commemorate the fact that the Qinghai Tibetans helped the Red Army during the Long March.
Two more mountain passes of between 3,500 and 3,900 metres were crossed and we descended to a beautiful lake before looking for a camping spot. Eventually we found an ideal place near a river where several people were fishing, and spent the night there.
