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Updated: June 9, 2025
The lake of Tengis lies in a hollow among low mountains, on the verge of the great desert of Gobi. The Chinese cavalry reached the summit of a road that led down to the lake at about eleven o'clock.
The slow and stately camel caravans still come down from Mongolia to Peking I have seen them wind their serpentine length through the gates of the Great Wall at Nankou as they have been doing for centuries past but no longer do they bring the latest news from the tribes about Desert Gobi.
If you could see the dusty little Chinese-Mongolian village, hanging on the upper lip of the mouth of the Gobi Desert, you would think it a strange place to find bliss. But joy can beautify sand and Sodom. Yesterday my hosts made me take a ride out into the Desert. Oh, Mate, in spots these glittering golden sands are sublime.
Weeds grew shoulder high, springing from between the stones of the great courtyards and open spaces connecting the temples and palaces, and we pushed ourselves through this brush, and stumbled over rolling stones, all the while enveloped by the whirling dust, the everlasting Peking dust, straight from the Gobi Desert.
The railway dare not venture among the mountainous countries of the Kou-Kou-Nor, and we were on our way to the great city of Lan Tcheou along, the base of the hills. Gloomy though the country might be, there was no reason for the passengers to be so. This glorious sun, with its rays gilding the sands of the Gobi as far as we could see, announced a perfect holiday.
Our fare in China, outside the Gobi district, was far better than in Turkey or Persia, and, for this reason, we were better able to endure the increased hardships.
I know of no other country about which there is so much misinformation as about Mongolia. Because the Gobi Desert stretches through its center the popular conception appears to be that it is a waste of sand and gravel incapable of producing anything.
Thus far the trail had not been bad, as roads go in the Gobi, but I was assured that the next hundred miles would be a different story, for we were about to enter the most arid part of the desert between Kalgan and Urga. We were prepared for the only real work of the trip, however, by a taste of the exciting shooting which Coltman had promised me.
There was a time when the great sandy desert of Gobi was the bed of a sea which communicated through the Caspian with the Baltic, as may be proved not only by existing geographical facts, but also from geological considerations. It is only necessary, for this purpose, to inspect the imperfect maps that have been published of the Silurian and even tertiary periods.
We had gone to Urga without even a puncture and I began to feel that motoring in Mongolia was as simple as riding on Fifth Avenue more so, in fact, for we did not have to watch traffic policemen or worry about "right of way." There is no crowding on the Gobi Desert.
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