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John and I left Professor Sun for our trip to Dunhuang which was another stop on the silk route. We flew by plane which was a very scary experience. The Chinese actually have Life Insurance Policies specifically for airplanes. It was a rough flight. Still, once we got there we stayed at the Silk Road Dunhuang Hotel which was really nice and famous since Bill Gates stayed there. The Gobi desert was right in our backyard.

We went to a couple of ANCIENT CITIES which were in the middle of flatter desert areas and surrounded by large walls. Inside there were small huts and buildings that looked alot like Mexican or Inca villages.

We took a trup to ECHOING SAND MOUNTAIN and CRESCENT LAKE which were side by side of eachother. There is an oasis there surrounded by sand dunes almost 1,000 feet high. We road camels around the dunes which was pretty fun. They kneel down for you to get on them and are really big. I couldn't get my camel to spit at anything and they didnt spell too bad. It was extremely windy that day with sand flying everywhere and cloudy so that it wasn'nt that hot. There were some pretty amazing views from the tops of the dunes that you climbed up to on wood stairs. We took wood toboggans down which was a lot of fun.

The MOGAO CAVES is a group of nearly 500 caves carved into a cliff wall. They range in size from the size of a mini-fridge to basketball court size. The caves are filled with paints all over the floors and walls must have taken the Buddhist monks hundreds of years to paint. There were many statues of Buddha, his fellow religious figures and his guards. There was one Buddha that was almost 100 feet tall, another that was 80 and a third that was 60 and laying down. The emensity of the statues and caves was just unbelievable. Unfortunately we could take no pictures inside the caves. The one in the bottom left is the cave that holds the 100 foot Buddha with fingers as big as my body.

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