Markuswelder wanders around Northern China.

[Jack Dawe]

Those sand dunes do look huge for sure. I can understand them being hard work. Even on level soft sand I walk for a mile and find I'm still where I started.

 

[Levina de Ruijter]

Wow. Great pics, Markus. And great stories! Those sand dunes look huge indeed. The shot with the people climbing them shows the scale very well. It must be incredibly hard to climb to the top.

I didn’t know the Gobi desert could be this cold. It’s a desert so I would expect the opposite!

Isn’t it hard to breathe, with so much fine sand in the air?

 

[Capn Jack]

It’s a dessert so I would expect the opposite!

Desserts can be cold (ice cream) or hot (bread pudding) (you probably got bitten by autocorrect).

All ribbing aside, that desert is at a similar latitude as the Dakotas in the USA, or the Black Sea closer to you. The Dakotas see temperatures between +40 to -40 °C (-40 to 100 °F) so I'd expect similar temperatures in the Gobi, as it is also far inland.

 

[Capn Jack]

Transportation. My favourite subject matter There's an extreme variation in modes of transport over there. Everything from Jet Airliners, bullet trains, slow trains, Buses, cars, Taxi's, Trucks, bicycles, right down to donkey and cart etc etc etc. They seem to have a bit of a love affair with three wheeled vehicles for the masses. Economy I guess. Less tyres to wear out and dispose of at a guess.

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Hmmmm. My mobile interwebz connection seems to be acting up, I'll try again once I get home on a proper computer

Are you using a data plan from a carrier outside of China? In the large cities, those seem to work well. You seem to be further afield.

This is a great set- all places away from the large cities.

 

[Levina de Ruijter]

Desserts can be cold (ice cream) or hot (bread pudding) (you probably got bitten by autocorrect).

Probably not. I usually look up the correct spelling of desert because it doesn't make sense to me; that first /e/ in "desert" should be silent in my mind and the emphasis should be on the last syllable. Yet it isn't. And I always get it wrong when I don't look it up. I've corrected it in my post!

All ribbing aside, that desert is at a similar latitude as the Dakotas in the USA, or the Black Sea closer to you. The Dakotas see temperatures between +40 to -40 °C (-40 to 100 °F) so I'd expect similar temperatures in the Gobi, as it is also far inland.

I'm probably too indoctrinated by all the desert movies where people are burning up.

 

[Markuswelder]

Are you using a data plan from a carrier outside of China? In the large cities, those seem to work well. You seem to be further afield.

This is a great set- all places away from the large cities.

No. Wifi seems to be everywhere, well, anywhere we stay. We kind of base ourselves at my Wife's Mums place, then travel around from there, so no issues with that. The Great firewall blocks access to a lot of sites, FB, Flickr and lots of others, I'm quite happy not being connected to social media all the time. I don't really bother uploading images when travelling, I just take a few SD cards and use them like 35mm film. Sometimes I've not even bothered with any sort of computer device, just taken my phone. I went to NZ over Christmas/New year just gone, and I took my Intel Skull Canyon i7 NUC plus a 15.6" portable USB-C monitor. That worked pretty well, the USB-C monitor needs no power, it has cr@ppy in-built speakers so all you need is a single power point, a small Bluetooth keyboard/touchpad and you're away. Not really any bigger than a laptop, but a lot more useful. To me. Trip before that, just my phone. I did buy a local SIM card both times there, my Daughter and Son in law were also travelling at the same time, so made it easy to keep in touch and hook up here and there. This time I think I might take my tiny little Ryzen 7 7735 8 core 16 thread NUC, which is actually my main computer. I've got 4 TB of internal SSD storage in it, and another 1TB SSD in a very small enclosure. I'll be interested to see if I can access my NAS this trip, but not in the slightest bit concerned if I can't, between the SD cards and external storage I reckon I've got enough room for a couple of years shooting. Not months lol.
My phone is USB-C, it has removable micro SD cards, so that's another option, as I've also got a USB-C card reader that works a treat with it. We'll see

 

[Markuswelder]

Wow. Great pics, Markus. And great stories! Those sand dunes look huge indeed. The shot with the people climbing them shows the scale very well. It must be incredibly hard to climb to the top.

I didn’t know the Gobi desert could be this cold. It’s a desert so I would expect the opposite!

Isn’t it hard to breathe, with so much fine sand in the air?

Never actually noticed to be honest. We found it to be uncomfortable more than anything else. Sand in everything, shoes, socks, down your neck, in your jocks/underwear, in my camera bag, and so on You can see how the Wife tried to wrap herself up to avoid it It's more when you get off the beaten track, rather than just wandering around the city etc, that you really notice it.
I'm not complaining, more just commenting on what we experienced.

 

[Capn Jack]

No. Wifi seems to be everywhere, well, anywhere we stay. We kind of base ourselves at my Wife's Mums place, then travel around from there, so no issues with that. The Great firewall blocks access to a lot of sites, FB, Flickr and lots of others, I'm quite happy not being connected to social media all the time. I don't really bother uploading images when travelling, I just take a few SD cards and use them like 35mm film. Sometimes I've not even bothered with any sort of computer device, just taken my phone. I went to NZ over Christmas/New year just gone, and I took my Intel Skull Canyon i7 NUC plus a 15.6" portable USB-C monitor. That worked pretty well, the USB-C monitor needs no power, it has cr@ppy in-built speakers so all you need is a single power point, a small Bluetooth keyboard/touchpad and you're away. Not really any bigger than a laptop, but a lot more useful. To me. Trip before that, just my phone. I did buy a local SIM card both times there, my Daughter and Son in law were also travelling at the same time, so made it easy to keep in touch and hook up here and there. This time I think I might take my tiny little Ryzen 7 7735 8 core 16 thread NUC, which is actually my main computer. I've got 4 TB of internal SSD storage in it, and another 1TB SSD in a very small enclosure. I'll be interested to see if I can access my NAS this trip, but not in the slightest bit concerned if I can't, between the SD cards and external storage I reckon I've got enough room for a couple of years shooting. Not months lol.
My phone is USB-C, it has removable micro SD cards, so that's another option, as I've also got a USB-C card reader that works a treat with it. We'll see

That's my experience, too. My employer pays for data via AT&T when I travel overseas and I find I can access everything I can at home on the phone. In the cities, WiFi can be very slow (as of last November). I found that surprising in some of the "tech hub" areas. How is WiFi where you are? Maybe I'm spoiled because Lincoln, NE has gigabit+ internet almost everywhere. Singapore internet seemed slow too.

 

[Markuswelder]

Now where were we?
And the most famous of all the statues/caves. Cave 130, dug in the 7th century -taking 29 years to complete, houses a Maitreya Buddha statue that is the largest sculpture of the entire cave network. The 26 meter-high statue is typical of the style of the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907). They actually figured that the statue was going to be viewed from ground level, so the corrected for perspective distortion by making the head & upper body larger than the lower body, to account for this. Pretty clever for back then I thought. Quite an interesting site to wander around, it also houses a huge collection of scrolls that document the area, the early Silk road, and history of the trade relations/history between the East and the West.

As we visited in late Winter, access was pretty good, it wasn't at all crowded, I got to see all I wanted with my personal, one on one tour guide.

Some of the early documentation teams efforts photographed.

Restoring some of the paintings

 

[Markuswelder]

One thing that did surprise me, for a Communist country, is the Art that seems to be around. Every city seems to have at least some artistic sculptures/structures, & I must say I was quite impressed with quite a lot of them.

Ran across this at the local Railway station. I think they were practising for some Dragon festival. A couple of the ladies actually insisted that I take their photo. I didn't know them from a bar of soap, yet never asked for a copy of the shots. Maybe they just liked me? Who knows.

It happened to be outside the local railway station