Tim Boelter

Mike and I got a late start today. We still only managed about 4 hours of sleep last night. Today we've been blended together with a tour group which is a big frustration because we are being herded along with them and aren't able to stop and take time to get good shots of everything.

We are becoming a little frustrated by our inability to communicate. We've been spending a great deal of time going from place to place to be introduced to people. It's difficult to express that we really have work that we need to accomplish while not offending their cultural traditions.

We did anticipate that this first leg of the trip would be this way, because we are primarily trying to make miles each day so that we can get to Urumqi and meet up with Lao Wang. He speaks English and understands that we are here to film and tell a story. So things should settle down once we're with him, and we should be able to take it all in at our own pace.

All of this rushing from place to place has also slowed our ability to send back dispatches and photos. We have the dispatches written and the photos taken, but we don't stop in one location long enough to transmit them. Hopefully we will arrive in Dunhuang tomorrow and have more time to get things out.

Today we spent some time in Wuwei in central Gansu Province. It's located about halfway between Lanzhou and Zhangye on the eastern edge of the Hexi Corridor. It's an ancient city that was once a strategic pass on the Silk Road and a center of Buddhism. We could see the southwest side of the Qilian mountain range from there.

We went to the Han Tomb and saw the famed bronze horse. The tomb was built at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty around 186-219 BC. It was discovered by a farmer in 1969. It's the tomb of a general from Zhangye. The tomb contained a wide variety of relics but the most famous is the greenish-colored bronze horse. The horse is galloping and standing on one foot. It's considered an amazing feat of construction for that time period. The actual horse is housed in a local museum, but copies of it are everywhere. The horse is now the global symbol of Chinese tourism. We have pictures forthcoming.

After leaving Wuwei we felt like we were in scenes from Lawrence of Arabia. We are surrounded by desert and sand dunes for as far as the eye can see. A group of off-road drivers came by and they thought it would be cool to let me drive one of their Jeeps. So I drove it through the desert sands. They really are treating us like kings over here.

Everyday brings new vehicle problems. Today we broke down in the desert with radiator problems.

We're now heading to Jiayuguan and maybe even as far as Dunhuang.

—Tim Boelter

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