Monday 27 October 2025
This morning we hired a Didi to Binggou Danzia Scenic Area, approx 60 km west of us. What a treat! We pretty much had this amazing geological beauty to ourselves. We were shuttled to the start but then were allowed to walk on the prescribed paths.
We enjoyed the various landforms on display. This is a 'magic camel greeting guests' and 'mushroom rock' (no, I've no idea why either).
Below on the left is 'waiting for return'. As Zhangye was a frontier town for the Silk Road many young men left on business/the army, and this resembled a mother and child waiting for their return. To the right is 'phantom of the Louvre' because of the concave/convex surfaces (I'm only repeating the signs).
We could see the Qilian Shan (Qilian Mountains) to the south of us - beautiful.
We did bump into a few other tourists (not literally), but on our return to the entrance we had not only a minibus to ourselves but a whole coach. My inner child found this more exciting than most would.
Once back at the entrance we discovered, fortunately, that our Didi driver had hung around for us. He obviously had no other jobs in the locality and figured we'd need moving to the next Geoapark, Zhangye Danxia.
Danxia is famed for its colourful mountains. We were there a little early in the day as the sun was high and the light still harsh. But it was amazing none-the-less.
We took our time at each viewing platform (you are shuttle bused between them). At one juncture we were joined by a coach load of Buddhist monks who created a splash of red as they swarmed from platform to platform. JC and I were wandering around semi-independently and at one stage JC turned around to chat to me and found a monk in my place.
There were lots of people posing so it seemed churlish not to join in. I really like this second picture - it's my desert weary look ;-)
It got busier as the light warmed and golden hour set in. However it wasn’t over crowded and we loved the stripy rocks.
We then made a mistake, as we left thinking it would be easy to catch a Didi. There were none in zone and, after 15 minutes, we thought we might be stuck 50 km from home. As luck would have it, our Didi driver (from earlier) had insisted we take his number. We messaged him and he was only 5 minutes away. It was a relief when he rocked up to drive us back to Zhangye.
We (I) had started to enjoy the cleaning service in our hotel room. On our first night we returned from supper to find they’d done a turn-down service with a red rose and gracious note plus 3 small savoury snacks with a similarly flowery greeting. Today we walked in to find a plastic bowl, flask of hot water and (on translation) a soothing soak for our feet. My feet were up for that.
For supper we had a ‘self-service’ hotpot experience tonight. Basically, you pick small dishes to hotpot (veg for me, meat for him) and we sat by a table with a camping stove on it on which the hotpot was balanced. It cost over half the price of our normal hotpot meal and I got a lot more veg as, instead of ordering a plate of tofu and courgette (30 yuan each), I had 4 small dishes of tofu, potatoes, lotus flower and cucumber for 18 yuan in total.
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