Another day, another travel day. We bid good bye to Zhangye and proceeded to Jiayuguan. Our second to last stop, Jiayuguan is best known as the beginning of the Great Wall. If you’ve been following this blog, then you know that we had previously visited Shanhaiguan, which is where the Great Wall ends. We thought it would be neat to see where it begins and neatly wrap up our Great Wall adventures.

Due to the amazingness that is high speed rail, we arrived in Jiayuguan in a mere 70 minutes. Being lazy travelers, we didn’t plan anything for the rest of the day. Our forays outside the hotel were a little bit strange. The most noticeable aspect of Jiayuguan is that it’s enormous. Much more enormous than it needs to be. It’s a city of about 200,000 or so, but the train station was probably 25 km or so away from the city center. And there were buildings all the way from the train station to the city center. It wasn’t just empty space.

Related to its size, Jiayuguan has unbelievably long blocks. We looked on a map and saw that we were about two blocks away from a large street. We decided to walk down the street and have some lunch. After about 15 minutes, we had reached the first intersection. It was like the world’s tallest man was the urban planner for Jiayuguan or something. Since we worked up an appetite walking one block, we decided to just stop and have lunch at the first place we saw.

Lunch

We decided to be strategic with lunch. With 3-4 weeks of the ‘Stans coming up on our itinerary, we wanted to eat pork while we could. The restaurant we found had pork belly on its menu. Score. A few minutes after we ordered it, our waitress told us that they were out. Unscore. We ordered sweet and sour ribs instead. Semi-score.

Wikitravel told us that there was a night market in Jiayuguan. Unfortunately, it was five blocks away. FIVE JIAYUGUAN BLOCKS. That’s like walking from Montana to Kansas. With nothing else to do, we roughed it and headed towards the night market. Five blocks and an hour later, we arrived. Admittedly, it was pretty cool. Jiayuguan is a little more down in the dumps than the other towns we’ve visited. The night market reflected its economic plight. There was none of the glitz and glamour of Xi’an’s night market. Instead, it was completely functional and a part of the daily life of the city. Workers were downing noodle bowls next to butchers and fruit vendors. It wasn’t pretty, but it was what it needed to be.

Cindy and I parked ourselves inside a Sichuan restaurant. They did have pork belly. It wasn’t the best. Semi-score, again.

Dinner