Travel Guide - The Mysterious Lop Nur Lake

THE Lop Nur borders the Taklimakan Desert in northweste China. It remained unknown to the outside world until Sven Hedin, a Swedish explorer, explored it at the beginning of the century. In the summer of 1980, Chinese biochemist Peng Jiamu disappeared while leading an expedition to Lop Nur. Many planes and people were sent out to find him but to no avail. The nightmare was repeated in 1996 when Chinese explorer Luo Chunshun, who escaped from death countless times during his eight years of exploration on foot, also died here. Thus many people tu pale at the mere mention of the place. This huge, desolate tract (some 100,000 square kilometers) was already a desert by the time of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. - A.D. 220) and nobody knows how many traders lost their lives traveling the Silk Road through the Lop Nur Silk Road tour .

The Lop Nur is the driest place in China and has an adverse climate. Annual precipitation is only 10-60 mm and some parts receive no rain at all, but evaporation has been measured at 2,000 mm. It is both dry and hot in the Lop Nur desert, with temperatures as high as 50 degrees Centigrade. On the surface the temperature can climb to 80 degrees Centigrade, stick an egg in the sand and it will be done in half an hour.

Life is hard in the Lop Nur due to the lack of water. If you stay too long under the sun, the skin on your hands begins to peel off and your lips chap. Even a pair of new shoes will be deformed in a couple of days because their moisture content will be ``robbed" by the dry air. Your skin tus red and becomes itchy very quickly here.

It is very windy and dusty in the Lop Nur. When the wind picks up to force 7 or 8, the desert around you is veiled in a curtain of sand. Even if you have tightened the ropes and pounded the stakes deeper to reinforce your tent, the howling wind is still frightening. And in the moing you will wake up to find your mouth, nose, ears, hair and anything else outside the sleeping bag full of sand.

Although adverse, the environment of Lop Nur is quite mysterious and appealing. Take the Yardang region as an example. In the Uygur language ``Yardang" means ``steep slopes," and is used to describe terrain with alteating eroded ravines and ridges affordable China tours.

There are many theories to explain the origin of the Yar-dangs, but generally people believe that they are shaped by the wind. Sand is blown away, leaving only stone and clay strata, which are then further eroded into irregularly shaped land forms. The Yardangs are usually a dozen or so meters high and several hundred meters long, and thousands of them, grand and majestic, extend for hundreds of kilometers in a maze. You may lose your way almost as soon as you enter, and therefore the Yardang is also called ``the ghost layer."

Mirages also add mystery to the Lop Nur. When the sun rises over the desolate desert, a mirage might appear just a few steps ahead of you: A pool of beautiful water surrounded by towering trees, or people moving about in a village. But when you head towards it, it may disappear mercilessly or simply stay always a few feet in front of you, luring you forward, until you have totally lost your way.

According to Wang Mili, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, there are neither water nor roads in the Lop Nur top 10 China tours, nor a single blade of grass or a single brook. Birds don"t ever fly over this desert. You can imagine how dangerous it is " you may walk for half a day only to find that you are back where you started.

The existence of Lop Nur dwellers makes the desert even more mysterious. "Nur" means "lake" in Mongolian. The Lop Nur people once lived in houses beside a giant lake. As Lop Nur lake gradually dried, they began to move to Milan, about 50 kilometers west of Lop Nur. History books on the ``Weste Regions" (a Han Dynasty term for the area west of Yumen Pass, including what is now Xinjiang and parts of Central Asia) record that the migrations, extinction of ancient kingdoms, and the sudden disappearance of a civilization in this area were all related to water. Milan was built during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) under the reign of Tubo and is now an archeological site. In the ruins of a Buddhist temple near Milan, a large number of precious cultural relics and a mural depicting angels have been found. The houses of the Lop Nur people were very simple, made of reeds and mud and basically unfuished. The Lop Nur people themselves were neat in appearance and dress.

Lop Nur is the only gateway to the southe and middle routes of the ancient Silk Road. Today more and more explorers, archeologists, geologists and even tourists are drawn here. As potassium-rich and fresh water are now tapped beneath the Lop Nur, this once ``hostile wasteland" can be expected to become an ``underground sea of gold" very soon.

tags: tourism in China

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