Yesterday, i received a call from a guest in Yinchuan. A spanish woman wanted to visit Khara Koto and also Ejinaqi in inner Mongolia. In fact, it’s a good idea but the time is very tight to get the special permits.
Nowadays,foreigners are not allowed travel freely in China. Some places have restirctions which make the foreigners have to find a suitable travel agency to hep them arrange the special permits in advance.
Foreigners travel to Ejinaqi will be required to apply the permits. And the permits need a in-country agency to apply from the government. That means, the foreigners can’t visit the speical places on their own. They have to use the Chinese to go with them. And this kind of permit will take some days to work it out. So i had to say sorry to the guest who gave me a call yesterday, because she wanted to go that places one day later. Time is very tight and we can’t make that joueney for her. It’s very easy to travel in China in big cities, but if you will go to somewhere special in China, please contatc a chinese local agency before you plan this journeny.
Let’s back to Khara Khoto. This place is also strange to most of Chinese. Maybe most of them have no idea about this city. And because the Ghoul Novel is very popular in 2008, there is a book called “Gui Chui Deng”《鬼吹灯》
I have found an article in the National Geographic to talk about the Alashan Plateau & Khara Khoto. But that article was written in 2002. For me, i went to Alashan plateau and Badain Jaran Desert in 2007 to report that area for a french magazine.
Recently, we have a french group go trekking in that place. The guide will bring back my favorate stone in that desert ” La rose de la desert ” Desert Crystal which made of sand and water.
If you are interest in this kind of places, you can write email to me and i can help to give you some suggestions.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Khara-Khoto (Mongolian: Khar Khot “black city”; Chinese: 黑城 Hēichéng “black city”[1] or 黑水城 Hēishuǐchéng, “black water city”) is a medieval Tangut city in the Ejin khoshuu of Alxa League, in western Inner Mongolia, near the former Gashun Lake. It has been identified as the city of Etzina, which appears in The Travels of Marco Polo.
Alxa League (Mongolian: , Alaša ayimaɣ, Chinese: 阿拉善盟; pinyin: Ālāshàn Méng) is one of 12 prefecture level divisions and three extant leagues of Inner Mongolia. The league borders Mongolia to the north, Bayan Nur to the northeast, Wuhai and Ordos to the east, Ningxia to the southeast, and Gansu to the south and west. The capital is Bayan Hot (older name: 定远营 Dingyuanying) in the aimag’s Left Banner.
The Badain Jaran Desert (Chinese: 巴丹吉林沙漠; pinyin: Bādānjílín Shāmò) can be found in western Inner Mongolia. The desert covers 49,000 sq. kilometers (30, 000 sq. miles) spanning the provinces of Gansu and Ningxia in China as well as Inner Mongolia.
This desert is home to the tallest stationary dunes on Earth. Some of the dunes reach a height of 500 meters (1,600 ft.). The dunes are kept in place in the arid, windy region by an underground water source. Analyses of the ground water indicates that it is snowmelt that flows through fractured rock from mountains hundreds of kilometers away.
The desert also features over 100 spring-fed lakes that lie between the dunes, some of which are fresh while others are extremely saline. These lakes give the desert its name which is Mongolian for “mysterious lakes”.