28 Nov 06
Everything looks closed in the daytime, partly because the locals aren't in the habit of turning on the lights in their shops, cafes and workshops, but the roadsides come alive at night with the flash and flare of welding; repairing trucks broken by the potholes, in many cases. Out of town, this is mineral-rich land; Gansu was the first province to oblige after Mao asked his people to find oil. Wheat and hops also grow here, with the help of irrigation systems bought from Germany. Despite these signs of wealth and modernity, there are also people living in caves.
Wuhai, our stop for the night, was built in 1976. All of it. Concrete and neon, neon and concrete. There's not much to keep us here, so we make an early start the next day, which involves a 380-mile drive to Hohhot through the edges of the Gobi Desert. It's mostly rocks rather than sand, and there are some lakes, which sounds unlikely - lakes? in a desert? - until you see them looking so insignificant next to the vastness of the rocks and scrub and sand.
And then we come to the non-driving highlight of our trip: Xiangsha Wan, or the Singing Dune if you're a tourist. It's a dune more than 100 yards tall, and it got its name because of the sound the sand from the top of the dune makes when it slides downwards. Legend has it that Marco Polo thought it was the whispering of demons who wanted to lead travellers astray. We heard neither singing nor whispering, because we were too busy on the ski lift, then toboganning down the dune, then racing round in dune buggies (victory to 4Car, since you ask).
The weather is bright and dry, the air crisp and clear once you're away from the smoke stacks of the power plants and chemical factories. We're still many hundreds of feet above sea level, and although we get short of breath every time we climb a monument or a sand dune the cars don't mind the altitude. The roads are generally worse than yesterday's but there are fewer police, so our speeds stay high. There's some vibration at around 85mph, which is probably due to the winter tyres our car is wearing, but you can accelerate out of it. And even though today's roads are fabulously straight and you can see for miles, you still need to be ready for the odd lump of dropped coal, or a rock, or a goat or a donkey, although the camels don't seem interested. There are some huge potholes, the odd open manhole, and every so often a bloke comes wobbling towards you on his bicycle. After dark, anything goes - and it usually goes with no lights on. The day ends in Hohhot, founded in 1580, although any relics of those days are outshone by the neon.
