We got up fairly late and met up with Marie, a German girl we'd met a  few nights back in DUnhuang. She was travelling in the same direction as us and was good company so we decided to see the sights together. Nowadays not much remains of the town's silk road history with much of the city having been modernised into large four lane boulevards and modern low-rise buildings, but just a few kilometres outside there are remains of the terminus of the Great wall which not only provided protection to the CHinese but also to the Silk ROad merchants who travelled in its shadow towards Xi'an.

Despite the grey weather making it decidedly less impressive, we hiked up about a kilometre of the Great wall where the clouds obscured the view but from where you got a real sense of vast scale of the dry and barren Gobi desert plain. Looking back the green "oasis" of Jiayuguan stuck out and it wasn't just due to the large industrial chimneys, but the greenery really did show!

After a quick but decent lunch at a local eatery where we trusted Marie's choice of dishes (she speaks excellent CHinese which has saved us much hassle!), we headed to the Jiayguan Fortress which formed a gateway to the West and where a large military outpost was once based to control the region and, no doubt, collect the taxes from passing merchants! It was a pretty impressive structure, though with little in the way of information. In fact the most interesting thing was a CHinese tourist who we spotted taking pictures of the "Laowei" (foreigners) through the opposite rampart. Wehn we bumped into her a few minutes later we spotted her again trying to take pictures subtly of us. We decided to go up to her and pose with her. She seemed half pleased by this and half bemused. It was then that we realised she had an entourage of what seemed to be body guards. She didn't speak much, too caught up in the whilrwind that was taking place around her, but I like to think that, ironically, she was some famous Chinese actress who had become a fan of us!

We returned to town and had supper at an odd restaurant that seemd to only serve wierd food like pigs stomach and more chicken feet. We ate bits of the dish presented to us and smiled each time the attentive waitress filled our glasses after each sip!